How do I get AOL's attention?

Factual Questions
1

A friend of mine, relatively new to the usenet posted an objectively innocuous comment to a newsgroup (the comment was along the lines of “You’re right about the character’s shirt color being purple, in addition, did you know that that particular shade of purple is made from muskrat glands”. No sane person could have possibly taken offense)

The usenet being what it was, an insane person did. The group’s resident troll, who’s only contributions to the group are “Get lost, cnt" or "Your rong, fcker” sent him a long, vaguely threating sounding rant. No actual threats, but lots of threating sounding comments (“When you die (soon!) Ill sh*t on the grond where your burried and Ill laff!”) and gross scatalogical remarks.

My friend was disturbed and pissed by this letter and he wrote to abuse @aol.com. (The troll’s AOL based) They sent him their standard form letter "We’re very concerned and will look into it but due to confidedentiality we will be unable to tell you what action we’ve taken…) He’s pissed enough that he wants some guarantee that AOL will inform the troll to never contact my friend again, etc. yadda, yadda, yadda.

I’ve suggested he give up (I’ve also offered to help him set up a kill-filter). I’ve never gotten a meaningful response from AOL regarding this sort of thing. He doesn’t want to, so I’m taking this to the Minions of the Source of All Knowledge:

Anyone know an address, other than abuse@aol.com for a situation like this? Any suggestions as to how get AOL to respond with more than a form letter?

Fenris

2

He’s not going to get any guarantee like that from AOL. They MIGHT close the guy’s account, but probably not. First Amendment, remember? Tell your friend to just filter the guy out. This is the Internet. He can’t get an ISP to drop a paying customer because he got flamed. How did the troll get your friend’s email address? If your friend gave it out (likely), to a group of people he knows nothing about (likely again), what does he expect?

3

Another problem may be that it is easy to fake an e-mail adress in the usenet. I can use any adress I want and the only way you could tell I came from AOL would be to look at the headers, which most people I know turn off. And even then you couldn’t tell if I went through a different news server using my AOL account.

But more to the point. Most of your really severe abusers are simply people that use free AOL accounts until they expire or are kicked off then get another startup disk and do it again. Until AOL stops giving away startups for free the problem won’t go away and AOL knows this. But they figure they are making money so why should they care if the rest of us are inconvinenced.