I sniped a guy on e-bay, he got the red-ass and subscribed me to a bunch of free sites (weather.com, etc.) with the name “Dumb-Ass” as my name. Now this was cute to begin with, but I am slowly getting sick of it. I unsubbed to these things, but he just sends new ones. I have sent an e-mail to lycos, where he has his e-mail account and I have sent copies of his prank to my ISP, but what else can I do?
Thanks
Q
BTW: I have also sent him a warning, since I was able to get his e-mail address off e-bay.
What a tool. The problem here is you can’t really prove that he is the one doing it. (For all they know, you could be subscribing yourself and blaming it on him.)
This is called “list-bombing” and it is harassment, and against the TOS of almost every ISP. Contact his ISP’s abuse desk and file a complaint. Most ISPs have an abuse desk at abuse@ispname.com (substitute their .com obviously).
Be polite. These abuse guys have to read tons of flames all day long. Use courtesy. Flatter them. When filing a complaint, I like to use this phrase: “I am sure that as a reputable Internet Service Provider, you do not condone the use of your systems to harass other net users.”
And Friedo, YES, there are ways to trace this back, but it requires the cooperation of the list operator. However, these list operators are obviously not very reputable since they lack a confirmation mechanism. These are required nowadays, due to the frequency of listbombing attacks.
If you require more assistance, I suggest posting your problem to Usenet at news.admin.net-abuse.email where listbombing is a common topic of discussion. There are many helpful people there who could help you combat this abuser.
Right, but it requires a LOT of cooperation. Your ISP has to convince EACH list-owner to look through his logs, the list owner has to find the IP and timestamp of the subscribe request, the ISP has to cross reference this with their DHCP or PPP logs…you get the idea. I don’t think any ISP is willing to go through all the effort.
Problem with contacting his ISP is that he is using a webmail account to contact him. Some webmail accounts will show the IP address of the person who sent the mail in the full headers (hotmail did at one time, not sure if they do anymore) but a lot don’t. Lycos would have to contact his ISP for you, if you couldn’t convince them to give you his IP, which you probably couldn’t without a warrant.
If you haven’t already, I would make a comment on his eBay profile about his harrassment, and maybe contact eBay about it, they might do something.
I’ve been listbombed a lot (although I never heard the word before now) because of a certain misunderstood humor website I run and I’ve had a little bit of success in dealing with it. Is this person signing you up for the same lists over and over again? Someone was doing that to me, signing me up for multiple lists run by the same company, and I sent the company an e-mail telling them what was going on and they installed a filter to keep out my e-mail address.
I think you should try sending polite e-mails to all the mailing list companies (unless there are way too many of them) explaining that their service can be used to harass people and that a lot of lists have some fairly simple safeguards in place to prevent that. If they hear that, they might start taking precautions to keep people from doing it. For example, they can make it so that you have to respond to the first e-mail they send you or you won’t be put on the list. They can also include the IP address that the subscribe request came from in that first e-mail. In my opinion, anyone who runs a mailing list and doesn’t do those two things should be reported to their upstream provider. (There’s always that tiny chance that their upstream will care.)
I recently busted a guy on AOL who listbombed me (I caught him because of the IP address thing), and turned him in to AOL, but I don’t know if they did anything about it or not because they never responded. Anyway, I only get a tiny amount of spam at that address even though I’ve been listbombed several times.