> The document then says that in 2011 he sent an email to “hundreds of atheists” with a link to his website and that I had reported him for violating GoDaddy’s policies against spam.
Give it to me in a list along with "hundreds" of red-herrings (let's say < 10000), and sure, no problem.
I'm loathe to defend GoDaddy, but I don't know if they can be "blamed" in this case, if only because what happened here was not the typical spam scenario.
If I'm understanding the situation correctly (and if I'm not, please let me know), a crazy person with an agenda sent a mass-mailing to about hundreds atheists/bloggers in an attempt to push his POV. Skepchick reports him to his email host (in this case, GoDaddy), under their spam terms.
GoDaddy does their standard process, which includes asking for opt-in proof, and revealing the email. Crazy guy goes crazy and makes a website dedicated to trying to defame Skepchick, using info he found about her online.
The problem is, this wasn't typical spam. Meaning, this wasn't some bot sending out Viagra sales pitches or the "great investment leads" people that send me 30 messages a day. This was unsolicited mail, yes, but it was with an agenda. Basically, I'd classify it more as harassment.
I'd imagine the situation would have been handled differently if it was flagged/seen/filed as harassing messages, rather than spam. I don't know, but I have to assume GoDaddy has an abuse team and that their methods of handling this sort of thing would be different.
Please understand, I'm not putting the onus on Skepchick to correctly know how to classify the message. It stands to reason she thought this was spam. But at the same time, I don't know if this sort of edge case is common enough to require a more complex method such as SHA-1 hashes.
Shitty situation all the way around, but I think the biggest problem was this was treated as a normal case of spam, when really it was a case of abuse/crazy.
It looks like he used his access to millions of customer emails to spam them with his political views.
> I know you don’t want to hear this from me. And I guarantee I don’t want to say it.
This whole thing just reeks of narcissism and delusion. And that's saying something, since I mostly agree with him otherwise. I can't imagine this did anything but piss off a lot of people.
Interesting point, can we really substantiate that if he originally sent that through e-mail? I could see something in his head clicking that it was bullshit but I see more formal, orchestrated evilness would have constructed this in a formal blogpost.
Latent evilness may have realized that he could use this to generate "crusader" points, but he couldn't have thought this really would have built that much steam.
These amazon emails literally look like automatic mails with a small custom message on top. He stated multiple times that what they said was WRONG yet no one bothered to listen to that part. If I was the author or if this ever happens to me, I'll go directly to disputing the charge.
TL;DR: User got spam from a website hosted by GoDaddy. User reports spam. GoDaddy wants to be good guy and asks spammer if user opted in (by providing spammer with the user's email). Spammer stops spamming, but harasses user by posting her photo online, which s/he probably got using the email address GoDaddy provided.
In retrospect, I'm sure there are better ways for GoDaddy to investigate such complaints, but I think they didn't do something very evil - an email address is hardly "personally identifiable information". On the other hand, if you don't want your photo to be posted online, don't post your photo online.
> One day he got a mail from the "webmaster" of one of the sites he linked to that he would have to update his links soon. I remember being really surprised that someone knew my dad had linked to them.
These days 100% of such emails I receive are from spammers trying to steal some google juice.
When a spammer gets caught attacking the commons yet again via a new company's "contractors" who just happen not to have been prosecuted or sued or even identified, it's pretty obvious he is the creature he always was.
Nobody is accusing him of anything other than hosting some poor joke domains. However, his domain was the one that the emails threatening several school districts came from. And while I'm sure they don't think he's the culprit, his server would still have some evidence on it.
> We flag up thousands of backlinks that are potentially spam
I don't know if this is good enough. Isn't he basically admitting that they send out thousands of C&D orders for linking? He's just apologizing for picking on someone with the means to fight back against this bullying.
I read the whole thing on the linked page. I would not be surprised if you had to click a button in his email newsletter to read it, given how ridiculously restrictive most mail hosts are now with their spam filters.
>what's the deal with one HTML page that I don't even run
You sound like I spammer I once knew. He would always say things like "What's the big deal with one e-mail that you're not going to read anyway. Just delete it."
The mail icon in his Mac's dock showed over 29,000 unread messages. Spam just didn't bother him the way Windows popping up ads for Facebook doesn't bother you.
From the article that was linked in a few posts up: He was running a major spam operation, and he got into a list of known spammers arranged by SpamHaus (an anti spam organization). The list happens to have about 100 people.
It's said that he received a few letters from the FBI and other law enforcements while he was running the operations. Nothing specific.
Give it to me in a list along with "hundreds" of red-herrings (let's say < 10000), and sure, no problem.
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