In computer news this week, 10/22/2002

The internet today - finding people on the internet.

This week we're going to look at finding individual people on the internet; several ways of doing that, and unfortunately you may not like all the information that's already out there about you.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from people about the internet is all the spam they get, and how they'd like to get their hands on the people who send them spam. Who is this email address? How can I find out who this person is who sent me this spam?

Unfortunately, most spam you receive is forged and has phony email addresses. When you see who the message is from and think that you want to get your hands on salesguy@gadgets.com - chances are this is a phony forged email address; 9 out of 10 of them are. Don't waste your time chasing this.

You have a better chance of reading the reply-to address, although this can also be forged, but often this may be a legitimate email address as the spammers do want to receive the mail orders they are trying to sucker people into buying. I get at least 2 or 3 spams a day on Earthlink, whose spam filter appears to work less and less, and I always respond to spam.

I forward them to my ISP - Earthlink to get them to try to do their spam filtering job, and I usually forward them to the domain that it appears the spammer is actually operating from. You can respond to abuse@whateverdomain.com and usually you will get a response. You want to send the internet headers of the message and the spam itself. Often spammers use temporary screen names at different domains, and the domains themselves have no idea a spammer is operating from their domain if you don't complain about them.

There are a couple sites I've always used for finding people, probably my favorite is switchboard.com, which has a white pages for people, yellow pages for businesses, and a reverse telephone number lookup service for when those mysterious numbers show up on your caller id. At switchboard.com you can type in a person's first and last name, and just their city, and usually find a list of names to sift through. The more specific info you enter, the better your search results. One thing that is disturbing to me about this process is that anyone can find you, print out a map of your neighborhood, and directions to your front door. Just by typing in kpbx and Spokane, Wa, I find out that KPBX is a radio station and it shows the address and phone number. If I click on map it shows me a printable map of the North Monroe neighborhood the station is located in. If I click on directions it lets me enter my home address , let's me pick my ending address of KPBX, and then prints both a highway map and a detailed turn by turn map from my house to the station's front door. This is ok if the person trying to find you is a lost relative, but not ok if it's someone with bad intentions.

You can also try to search for email addresses at Switchboard but it's not very accurate. When I type my own name in it finds no Frank Delaney's. But if I type Steve Jackson's name in it finds 37 email addresses for that more common name, but none of them are actually for our own Steve Jackson of KPBX.

I have not found a reliable site for looking up email addresses, probably because people change them so often; as ISP's go up and down in the middle of the night.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 624-7230