...as long as I'm thinking about icky things...
Within a year of the sig-changing incident, some spammer used one of my addresses in the From header of their mail. The address was one of those 'free for life' ones and forwarded to my less-permanent school-provided address.
I won't mention the provider of that address, as they may have cleaned up their act since then.
I discovered a gazillion bounce messages in my inbox one day, some of which included the bounced message... which was spam. My address was in the From header. I also discovered a large volume of venomous hate mail from folks who had received the spam. While I felt bad for them, I was feeling worse for myself.
A few days later, I got a message directly to my school account from someone who had been unable to reach me at my 'permanent' address. It turns out that my account was closed. When I contacted support, they said that sending spam was in violation of the terms of use, and that they couldn't re-open the account. I provided them with instructions for the trivial From header forgery and they admitted that they hadn't done any investigation beyond looking at the From header... but they still wouldn't re-open the account.
At that point, I was happy to leave them. Sucky service sucks.
This was years ago. Hopefully they've invested in clues since then.
-matt
ISPs
pudge on 2002-08-19T20:27:38
I've three times had my service providers shut me down, or threaten to.
Once was my Counter Terrorist page on netaxs, back around '96. A single web page had IMG SRC links to arbitrary web counters on other web sites. People would come to my page and just keep hitting reload, and bump up the poor counters of these other sites. Abuse of lack of HTTP_REFERER checks. At the time, I didn't even know about HTTP_REFERER, so I didn't even know if the requests could be blocked; as it turned out, several web page counter programs soon started HTTP_REFERER checks, at least one of them linking to my page in its docs.
:-) Long story made short, they shut off my web site due to complaints. Lame. I left them.
Second and third were both because of a net.kook on clpm, who for some reason hated it when people would Cc: him in email when replying to him on usenet. That was my default setting, and I wasn't going to change it just because he got his panties in a bunch. So he wrote to my ISP, Adelphia, and email provider, Pobox, and said I was harassing him. He didn't mention that my posts were not harassment, but the fact that I was sending them to email instead of just to Usenet was the harassment. Neither looked into the allegation and both threatened me with closing my accounts; I explained the situation to both, and Pobox said "no problem", and Adelphia never responded. I am still with both.
