I would've cut down on communicating with the person. He's obviously illiterate and his income is fueled by fraud. In my experience, you give them a single friendly but frank email with 24 hours to respond and then you just have to go through the proper channels. In this case removing his domain.
I'd like to believe the good in people. But, this individual's conduct from the outset demonstrates bad faith.
That trusting income from Google is a bad bet?
Or that he should not have threatened the spammer?
With regards to the threat - he did have a valid claim against the guy - he could have complained to the registrar and eventually had the spam domain confiscated.
As to relying on Google, Amazon, Paypal and friends to stand by you when things get tough... plenty of other people have made that mistake in the past.
Often they trust them because they have no other real choice. I'd watch this with more of a sense of 'there but for the grace of god go I'
I would have taken his legit email and after some time subscribed him to a dozen goat porn sites. Man, I hate such people: they ruined the Internet for the rest of us, and the public steadily migrating from the open web or USENET to proprietary centralized closed systems is also in part because of them.
BTDT. But I've also spent time thinking "uh, is this someone who warrants a polite explanation, or will that be a mistake?" It's not easy. Spammers will try to exploit anything you do, anything at all.
He opted in to receive spam due to carelessness. I don't see the legitimacy of him making anyone but himself the responsible party. He "killed" his own email account.
Slandering the company that provided a "free" service and gave him the chance to opt out of the cost of that service by calling them untrustworthy also doesn't seem fair.
What he received by email was spam, plain and simple.
And the despicable way they handle signups speaks for itself. I would never have gotten as far as he did because I know that anyone who does that is scamming me. There's no other reason to do it. If people actually liked the service, they wouldn't need to twist your arm to get you to sign up.
How about just asking, "Hey Matt, can you say something about why you decided spam links should count for negative value instead of 0?"
I've never met him, but as demonstrated by his long HN profile, Matt is clearly a nice guy. He's also smart, so he probably thought this exact case through. None of us outside Google really know how this works.
None of that means his group didn't make a poor decision in this case, but let's see if we can talk like adults and can learn more before going all "OMFG this is bllsht" on him...
Yep. On the bright side, he is admitting he received the emails and is willing to pull them down. noreply.com is currently held by a domain sitter. Are they capturing emails behind the scenes? What other domain names are foolishly used for redirecting email?
Further, while there might be blackmail involved here, could those companies be sued for fraud for misrepresenting their identities to be this guy? Is "ignorance" a defense?
Frankly all the messages he has to put up with are plain stupid, so if he's being a bit of a bastard, rightly so. I just found about his websites, bookmarked nomadlist.com already. It's funny, to say the least, how people exaggerate taking some data from a database and spitting it out as HTML. The important bit here is the data and the presentation, nothing else.
WRT $50k/mo, for any sane person that's two times more-than-enough. If I could stably do $5k/mo from an app or website I'd be happy.
He has john.w.smith and is repeatedly typing in john.smith, and also hands it out to humans who then want to contact me about his things.
Apparently for many sites, user retention & money are more important than verifying an email address up front. He visits the scummiest betting and dating sites, so I'm not very surprised.
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.
His whole defense of the hosting company's hypothetical failure to help is bizarre. He considers a lot of things that aren't his concern or even really his business. A real analysis of whether to complain would only consider whether the hosting company will be responsive and whether they are competent to fix the problem.
Why is he considering—with incomplete information—the hosting company's legal options and the severity of the spamming?
Edited to add: He could also consider whether it is his hosting company with the problem or the orgs using UCEPROTECT; although as someone who needs their emails to go through "no matter what" that can be more difficult.
> 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 surprised he doesn't first check the whois/nslookup of the domain name contacting him. That's always the dead giveaway whenever I get contacted by scammers
I'd like to believe the good in people. But, this individual's conduct from the outset demonstrates bad faith.
reply