Hello there - good work everyone, by the way!

I'm a very successful spammer-trasher via Knujon and SpamCop; my home email & multiple bulk work emails at various companies are all on the same lists despite being completely unrelated so my apparently unconnected reports have been a rather effective pincer movement! I look after sales@, enquiries@, etc for some well-known companies, and I have helped to wipe out several individuals!

I have one remaining "pet" spammer, and I can see this name-based method will trash him at a stroke. However, I am having problems setting up Complainterator:

I have successfully downloaded Complainterator, latest version. However, when I put in the spam site (in the correct format), eg
videofsilms.cn

I only get as far as a WHOIS web page with all the details, but no composed complaint. I get the same problem on both home pc and work pc.

A second issue, both at home and at work, is that 9 times out of 10 I get the WHOIS failed message, even with a long wait time. Again, any ideas?

Please advise.

Best wishes, and keep up the good work!

Preparing reports for videofsilms.cn works okay for me. But I can see that the traversal is very slow. When you see it stuck on a traversal page and the text highlighting flashing, hit the pause/break key (upper right keyboard) until the page finishes loading, then hit it again to restart Complainterator. Otherwise Complainterator may time out first.

The traversal for videofsilms.cn showed 5 different IP addresses on multiple ISP's IP ranges, so it's probably hosted on a botnet of trojan-infected computers. That's worth pointing out in your report. It is evidence the sites are illegal and also that there is no ISP knowingly hosting the site that can shut it down for spamming. The registrars for the domain and/or nameservers are the only ones who can effectively shut the site down by stopping the domain from resolving to any of the potentially hundreds of infected servers.

As far as timing out a lot, if you are using who.is for your lookups, it has been having some problems the last few days. Try doing the report without checking the who.is option and see if it works any better. (Or let us know which domains are causing problems -- some like those .es phishing domains, don't even have a whois server, so neither who.is nor dnsstuff can provide the registrar name.)

Welcome to the CC forum and Complainterator.

Complainterator does have a few problems, but they can be overcome.

1. It does not work with Firefox (for me); I can only use Internet Explorer. FF must be closed when using it with IE.
   
2. It works best when
   
   • the address bar is selected (F6)
     
   • the mouse pointer is inside the IE window
     
   • mouse & keyboard is left alone while Cpltr is doing its work

• the address bar sometimes goes blank; leaving Cpltr hang; press F8 to terminate, and restart
  
• DNSstuff and Who.is sometimes take too long to respond, and Cpltr "lost a window". Sorry, start again

If anyone has any problem making Complainterator work (eg "Firefox does not work for me" then post the details here so that bugs can be addressed.

Relevant information -

Language used (English / French / German etc)
Browser used, and release level and any unusual settings, plug-ins etc
Error message relating to the problem
Observations of behavior leading up to the failure
Operating System and release level
Screen shots showing the problem

1. use the "de-accelerator" to slow the program down
2. press Pause until the response catches up, and press it again to release the program

[
Of course, the mail client of your choice must be active.[/quote]

It must also be the default broweser

I am able to use it with my default browser Seamonkey (equivalent to Firefox+Thunderbird email) and my emails will go out through Seamonkey even though I have had to make Outlook my Windows default email program in order to use the address book for faxing. So the email program that the browser recognizes as default is the one that counts.

One big caveat is to close any browser windows already open for any kind of whois lookup sites (unless there is only one open and you are starting Complainterator from that particular window). Complainterator should open up multiple tabs on the same window, but if there are other separate whois windows open, it tends to jump around between them and create chimeric reports (mixing up which domain goes with which registrar).

Thanks for the replies, everyone - we're getting there. I hope this becomes a useful thread for anyone with set-up issues.

Ok, I'll report back in a day or two as I'm getting different issues on two differently set-up PCs. One thing I have found is that having had Google advanced search as my home page may have been confusing the script. With a blank home page I seem to get further than before, but not yet all the way - the furthest has been an error message about not reaching the traversal page.

The offending spams to my home PC are all for sites such as:

videofiams.cn
vidrofilms.cn
videofixms.cn
videofdlms.cn

-you get the idea!

If anyone wants to report them on my behalf please feel free to go ahead and let me know! Meanwhile I'll carry on with my efforts - the main objective is still to terminate our work spammer.

I did report the first one. Both the domain and its nameservers are hosted on botnets, and I was actually able to telephone the person whose identity was stolen to register the nameservers, so I could definitively tell Tucows that it was a fraudulent registration. Hopefully they will deep-six the nameservers and bring down the lot of them. Unfortunately, it apparently takes more than 24 hours for them to act.

Heh, that's fantastic, AlphaCentauri! Nice work. Thanks so much. I can see this is going to be fun... I'll let you all know if I get any more vid*ofi*ms.cn spams! Somehow I have a feeling they are going to reduce.

While reporting those, feel free to add a request to remove the whole lot. The rest of the family (refer: http://rss.uribl.com/ns/exponatomuze_com.html ) include
dvideofilms.cn
fastvideoffs.cn
fastvideomfs.cn
fastvideopfs.cn
fastvideorfs.cn
fastvideosfs.cn
fastvideovfs.cn
fastvidetofs.cn
fastvidexofs.cn
nvideofilms.cn
pvideofilms.cn
vcdeofilms.cn
vddeofilms.cn
vhdeofilms.cn
videcfilms.cn
videdfilms.cn
videffilms.cn
videhfilms.cn
videiofilms.cn
videkofilms.cn
videocfilms.cn
videodfilms.cn
videoefilms.cn
videofidlms.cn
videofielms.cn
videofiglms.cn
videofiilms.cn
videofilfdssdfms.cn
videofilgs.cn
videofilhs.cn
videofilks.cn
videofilmq.cn
videofilmt.cn
videofilmw.cn
videofilsdfses.cn
videofinms.cn
videofiqms.cn
videofitms.cn
videofnilms.cn
videofqlms.cn
videofsilms.cn
videofslms.cn
videofwlms.cn
videohfilms.cn
videoofilms.cn
videotilms.cn
videovilms.cn
videowfilms.cn
videowilms.cn
videoxfilms.cn
videozilms.cn
vidheofilms.cn
vidhofilms.cn
vidjofilms.cn
vidkofilms.cn
vidlofilms.cn
vidoeofilms.cn
vidoofilms.cn
vidpeofilms.cn
vidreofilms.cn
vidteofilms.cn
viideofilms.cn
vijdeofilms.cn
vikdeofilms.cn
vildeofilms.cn
vimdeofilms.cn
vipdeofilms.cn
vipeofilms.cn
viqeofilms.cn
vireofilms.cn
viseofilms.cn
viveofilms.cn
vkideofilms.cn
vmideofilms.cn
vnideofilms.cn
vpdeofilms.cn
vwdeofilms.cn
vxdeofilms.cn
vzdeofilms.cn

Oh yes!!! That^^ is confirmed from the "end-user" ie me! Messages from all kinds of apparently unconnected senders were still incoming during much of today, then got 100% terminated.

Bye bye spammer!

Update: I now confirm that having Google advanced search as home page does indeed interfere with the script. Setting a blank homepage is a work-around.

I am moving forward: I now get as far as an error message from dnsstuff.com themselves, because I am not yet registered with them. This makes Complainterator give its "failed to get traversal window" message. So it seems one must be registered with dnsstuff for Complainterator to work (not a problem, but thought I should question this).

When I begin to register with dnsstuff they say I need to Buy Now or Try Free for 21 days (again not a problem, I'll do it) - is this a change of their policy, as I had the impression registration was previously merely a formality?

Anyway, I'll be back in touch soon.