I deep-dove into the identity of a spammer. They were sending me the crappiest, absolutely lowest-denominator hodge-podge of spam. Fly repellent, ultrasonic dog

I deep-dove into the identity of a spammer. They were sending me the crappiest, absolutely lowest-denominator hodge-podge of spam. Fly repellent, ultrasonic dog whistles, knives. It all seemed like legit businesses, so it was just some marketing firm that bought an email list somewhere. Whenever I get spammed, I check the email headers. Turns out they were using an email with the owner’s initials in the unsubscribe header. From it, I was able to easily guess their actual name. I found them on LinkedIn! I used that, plus the list of all the domains they used for marketing and sending mails, to build a pretty comprehensive map of their operations. I thought for a while about what I could do with this info… but in the end, reporting them to my country’s consumer rights authority for spam did the trick. No reason to get in trouble myself, as fun as it could be. So the lesson is: look at email headers! There’s fun stuff in there!