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Website Spammer

Beta2

Hi

I have a website, which I won't name, it sells a service somewhat like property management. We basically act as a middle man putting possible clients and customers in contact with one another.

Unfortunately last week a potential customer turned to be nothing but a time waster, they continually ask us for information about our clients, then contact our clents directly. Then then contuinue to waste our clients time, then, understandably, our clients get pissed off with us.

We could deal with this initially as all the requests were coming from a single eircom.net address but now they are coming from different accounts and its hard to tell which ones are genuine.

Can anyone offer any advice on this. The problem seems to be coming from brussels, can I ban all Brussels based IP addresses?

Any help appreciated

B2

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the Guru

I asked this question before and yes you can ban IP addresses if you are using PHP but to go about banning all IP addresses from and particular country might be a nightmare , maybe get in touch with your host and ask them first , there are some really helpful techie quys on here that can reslove you problem.

Serbian

If you use PHP, you could use MaxMind's GeoIP to determine what country the person is in and block them accordingly. It is extremely easy to spoof what country you are in however by using anonymous proxies. Also, if it is a case of people just sending email to you, they can just sign up for email accounts with Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail to continually send mail to you.

Beta2

Thanks for the advice.

I'll give it another week and hopefully our friend will get bored, I'd prefer not to have to block the whole of brussels to eliminate on person!

Cheers

B2

mneylon

You wouldn't be able to block Brussels by itself and would end up blocking all of Belgium

Serbian

blacknight wrote:

You wouldn't be able to block Brussels by itself and would end up blocking all of Belgium

Interestingly, Maxmind has a GeoIP City Database. So it is technically possible to block just one city, but I don't know how accurate it is for European cities.

mneylon

It *might* work with the US ISPs, but it definitely wouldn't work in most European countries...

Serbian

blacknight wrote:

It *might* work with the US ISPs, but it definitely wouldn't work in most European countries...

They claim over 60% accuracy for a few European countries and 75% accuracy for US Cities. I suppose there isn't really a way to substantiate their claims.

I have noticed that Google Analytics breaks all the way down to suburb when veiwing the location of visitors to your site. I suppose they use the MaxMind database to do it?

mneylon

They could be using their own database.. The way most of those databases work is by linking an IP (from a range) to a geographical location.

So, as far as some of those databases are concerned, search.ie is in Carlow

Beta2

Another Q

Can I find out the IP address of where an email is sent from?

B2

mneylon

Short answer - yes

Longer answer - it depends on how it was sent. You can track back to the sending mail server IP, but you may not be able to see the end user's actual IP if they are using a webmail facility.

jmcc

Serbian wrote:

They claim over 60% accuracy for a few European countries and 75% accuracy for US Cities. I suppose there isn't really a way to substantiate their claims.

The Maxmind db would not be accurate when it comes to Europe as dialup subnets are rarely broken down on a country/location basis. Instead they are limited to the ISP's location. With business IPs, there may be a whois record available.

Regards...jmcc