Sam Spade is a discontinued 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, refers to unsolicited messages sent in bulk via email. The term originates from a Monty Python sketch, where the name of a canned meat product, "Spam," is used repetitively, m ...

. The same name was also used for a related free web service that provided access to similar tools. The Sam Spade utility was authored by Steve Atkins in 1997 and was 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 ...

. The last fully functional version of the website was available in early 2004, after which it suffered outage problems due to "blackholing of SamSpade.org by several RIRs and general heavy usage."

Query tools

The main features (query tools) were: * Zone Transfer – ask a

DNS server A name server is a computer application that implements a network service for providing responses to queries against a directory service. It translates an often humanly meaningful, text-based identifier to a system-internal, often numeric identi ...

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), mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. In some contexts, the a ...

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 assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface i ...

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 Enginee ...

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 an ...

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 applica ...

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

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

* Parse email headers – read

email headers Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving digital messages using electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the ...

and make a guess about the origin of the email

References

{{reflist 1997 software Anti-spam Windows security software