Geodog

Sam Spade: Find out who is who on the net

If you run on Windows and want to know who owns a domain name, the name of the computer that your firewall says is pinging you, if your server is on an email blacklist, or where the delay is between you and that web site that seems so slow, Sam Spade is for you.

Sam Spade is a handily little Windows application originally written by Steve Atkins as an anti-spam tool, but it is useful for a lot of things besides combatting spam. It replaces or serves as a front end to the command line Unix utilities such as Whois, Ping, Traceroute and Nslookup, as well as providing lots of additional functionality. It can give you the IP address of a website, and the domain name for an IP address. It can crawl a website and report back if there are any email addresses exposed on it, or if it is pulling any images from any other servers.

I don't need it often, but when I do, it is very useful. It is easier than trying to remember the syntax of windows command line tools cloned from Unix, which always vary just a little bit from one Windows version to the next, and it is much easier than dealing with the whois page on various registrar's web pages. The help file is complete, if a little dense, and as a bonus inlcudes the full text of the infamous Monty Python spam sketch. If you want a less dense introduction to chasing down spammers with Sam Spade, one enthusiastic user has even gone to the trouble of writing up her own illustrated help pages for Sam Spade.

I've used Sam Spade for years, and recommend it very highly as a great little network utility. I have never run into any problems with it.

Details:
Rating: 5 stars
Cost: Freeware
Version reviewed: 1.14
Date reviewed: March 08, 2003
Affiliate (i.e. Does Geodog get a commission if you buy a copy?): No
Link:Download Sam Spade

Some people tell me that they don't download shareware and freeware. They miss out on some useful and fun stuff (although they probably don't have as many late nights debugging Windows weirdness). However, if you are one of those people, some of same functionality from the application is available on the author's website, at Sam Spade Org.