WARNING: Great pains are taken to ensure that abuse addresses are up to date, and they are generally pretty reliable. It is considerably more difficult to keep admin and tech addresses up to date since their sources are frequently unreliable -- so be very careful when using them, especially when abuse addresses are available. Spam is infuriating, but firing off complaints to all contacts in addition to abuse addresses can be interpreted as a form of spam itself.

Try the Spam Reporter. Paste your email headers only into the Spam Reporter text area, press the 'Prepare email' button, and then click the 'Send Mail' link to send a completely prepared email from your mail client.

You can enter an IP address (like 216.239.129.162), a domain name (like lpsci.com), or a machine name (like mail.lpsci.com) and either call the appropriate registry (e.g. ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, etc.) to return a page with the responsible parties, just retrieve the email addresses of the responsible parties, find out who actually owns the domain, or 'hit' the machine.

If the email addresses of the responsible parties are not available, then the appropriate registry is called. Returning the email addresses of the responsible parties can be useful since abuse email addresses for reporting spam may be returned that do not appear with the information provided by the registry. As the collection of responsible email addresses gets larger, it will defer to a registry less often.

The 'Who owns this domain?' button actually finds out who owns the entered domain name or the domain name of the entered IP address or machine name. This will be different than the responsible party of the IP address when the domain is being hosted by someone other than the owner of the domain name, like a web hosting service. However, when the owner of the domain is the same as the responsible party of the IP address, then generally, a mail server is being used without authorization by an outside party, like a spammer, or the owner is a spammer. Spam should not forwarded to the owner of the domain name unless that owner is also responsible for the IP address or you continue to get spam from the same source in spite of notifying the responsible party of the IP address.

The 'Hit that site!' button attempts to hit a web page at the entered IP address, a domain name (like lpsci.com), machine name, or a web page and display the headers returned from the web server at that location. Port numbers may also be entered by putting a colon (':') after the entered host followed by a port number and then by an optional page; the default port number is 80 - the standard port for a web server. Do NOT include the 'http://', but do include the 'www' if necessary, except before an IP address. For instance, to check out 'http://www.lpsci.com', enter 'www.lpsci.com' in the field. To check out port number 8765 of 'http://216.239.129.162/test.html', enter '216.239.129.162:8765'. This is not meant to be a substitute for Netcraft, which gives you information about what is running on a particular machine; it just gives you an idea of what your web browser sees when it first hits a web page.