Sam Spade was the name of a Windows software tool designed to assist in tracking down sources of

e-mail spam Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoida ...

. It was also the name of a free web service that provides access to similar online tools. The Sam Spade utility was authored by Steve Atkins in 1997. It is named after the fictional character

Sam Spade Sam Spade is a fictional character and the protagonist of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel '' The Maltese Falcon''. Spade also appeared in four lesser-known short stories by Hammett. ''The Maltese Falcon'', first published as a serial in the pulp ...

Query tools

The main features (query tools) were: *

Zone Transfer DNS zone transfer, also sometimes known by the inducing DNS query type AXFR, is a type of Domain Name System, DNS Database transaction, transaction. It is one of the many mechanisms available for administrators to distributed database, replicate DN ...

– ask a

DNS server A name server refers to the server component of the Domain Name System (DNS), one of the two principal namespaces of the Internet. The most important function of DNS servers is the translation (resolution) of human-memorable domain names (example. ...

for all it knows about a domain * SMTP Relay Check – check whether a

mail server Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent (MTA), or mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using SMTP. The terms mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host ...

allows third party relaying * Scan Addresses – scan a range of

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

es looking for open ports * Crawl website – search a website, looking for

email address An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineer ...

es, offsite links, etc. * Browse web – browse the web in a raw

format * Check cancels – search your

news server A news server is a collection of software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. Access to Usenet is only available through news server providers. Articles and ...

for cancel messages * Fast and Slow Traceroute – find the route packets take between you and a remote system *

S-Lang The S-Lang programming library is a software library for Unix, Windows, VMS, OS/2, and Mac OS X. It provides routines for embedding an interpreter for the S-Lang scripting language, and components to facilitate the creation of text-based applic ...

command – issue a scripting command; useful for debugging scripts * Decode URL – decipher an obfuscated

URL A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...

* Parse email headers – read

email headers Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

and make a guess about the origin of the email

Website history

The last fully functional version of the website was available 2004-02-26. Since then it experienced various outage problems due to "blackholing of SamSpade.org by several RIRs and general heavy usage." and is no longer online. The URL currently redirects to https://tools.wordtothewise.com/ which contains a similar set of web tools under the brand name "wiseTools" and hosted by Atkins's email software business Word to The Wise

References

{{reflist

External links

Sam Spade
home page (currently offline)

Windows client download page (currently offline

archived Windows client software

from ''MajorGeeks.com''
Using Sam Spade
Sam Spade tutorial by Terry Pasley, 2003, maintained at SANS Institute InfoSec Reading Room 1997 software Anti-spam Windows security software