Some little creep is running around submitting my email address to a bunch of spam places and the like, and I’m getting tons of unwanted mail in my main email account. Is there anything I can do about it? Said creep herself has one of those ‘hotmail’ type accounts, so revenge, besides being a stupid and pointless waste of time, would be futile.
I hate to turn on mail controls because figuring out everything I’d need to keep out would be almost impossible. I can’t just say “let these on the list in” because I’d forget somebody, and I get mail from businesses and stuff that I do need.
Is this a business address or one of the free sites like HotMail or Yahoo? If so, the best recourse might be to open up a new account and transfer your address book to that one, then see about closing the old one down. Then send an address update to everyone on your address book, explaining what’s up.
Then go kick the little bitch’s ass. Just make sure she doesn’t find out your new address.
Please contact my friend TJ Menlove at AOL (tjmenlove@aol.com). She is a very competent trouble shooter and may be able to help you uncover the sleaze ball that’s screwing with your account. They’ll have a difficult time messing with you if they’re banned. Let us know in this thread how things go for you.
FFA = free for all mailing list. Probably the closest thing to a mailbomb that isn’t a mailbomb (mailbombs are infinitely cooler, though). It’s a list of (in your sake hopefully a very small) number of people, all of whom can email each other (sending to the list, of course). Most FFA’s I’ve seen have a limit of one email per subscriber (that’s sending, not receiving), but most have hundreds of members, so this will be scant comfort.
Good luck. If it’s any comfort, I’m sure AOL would be willing to assign you a new email addy/screen name…
What you should do, like Aglarond says, quit AOL (that’s of course, my non-biased opinion too )
Anyways, in your next account, do this: your personal ISP account (e.g. AOL or whatever ISP) may be used for personal and/or business; use a free account such as Hotmail or Yahoo for junk mail or world-wide account. As a matter of fact, have multiple free accounts for whatever else reason. I use my personal ISP account for friends and stuff and my free accounts for junk mail or world wide receiver if I travel or for forum use (like SD). I can easily nip out junk-mails using hotmail.
Oh yeah, that really helps. You can contact their ISP and they will (should) ban them. They will take away the access of that perosn to the internet (if it is an isp that you pay to, they also won’t receive any refund).
Of course, the person can get another ISP, but if they do this a lot, they may be running low on decent ISPs. Thye’ll also have to resend their email address to friends, businesses etc.
If their ISP won’t do anything about them, speak to AOL, provide them with all the info that you have & say can they intercede with the other ISP, say that unless something is doen about it, you’ll have to close your account, as you can’t read your mail of use anything. They’ll do it to keep your money, even if they have no special interest in you as one of their users (& a lot of large ISPs don’t).
IP, ISP, depending on how sneaky the person is, it’s all the same thing. Go to tucows and do a search on (frick, I forget the technical term) domain lookup, or something of the sort. Basically, it’s a program that allows you to type in the IP and it’ll spit out the domain of the person. It’s usually something really obvious (usually something.edu, actually). FYI, rr = roadrunner, and the city should be in there somewhere, and most other ISPs are spelled out. If you want, I’ll email you a copy of the program when I get home, just email me or post here. (I hate these guys.)
KKBattousai, i went to tocows and got the software! Thanks a lot! I got a couple of good leads, I think. Thanks for the info!
Zanster, I sent this to TJManlove:
The IP address i found on that (FFA) email just goes to some site for submitting to FFAs, virtualpromote.com, so that’s not much good. but when i ran the originating IP (from the only Email i got from this actual person) through the whois, i got: http://www.1Cust28.tnt2.orlando.fl.da.uu.net/ (it doesn’t go anywhere, don’t click on it.)
)
It’s just numbers.