mr. methane's Journal: A message from "abuse@...."

As part of the engineering group at a wholesale bandwidth provider, I get the joyful task of receiving, a few times a week, complaints about spam.

The ironic part is, I have nothing to do with them. A user sees one of my routers in a traceroute, and fires off a rude message.

The rude ones, I delete. Just part of the job; much like working in a restaurant and having to clean up after a drunk now and then.

But a couple of times a month, some idiot either fires off a threatening, or truly abusive message. Stupid. Very.

The abusive ones, just get forwarded to their ISP with a polite introduction.

The threatening ones go to the cops. Only two have required this action so far, and in both cases it was some teenager blowing off steam.

One of them was arrested when he mouthed off to the cops. (cop called me on his cellphone while the genius was sitting in his back seat, crying about how he didn't want to go to jail after all). The other, the cops said they didn't arrest him, but they were going to keep an eye on the house because it looked like his father was not entirely thrilled about having the police interrupt their dinner and frisk the entire family.

So, before you fire off that "stop your spammer..." missive, please make sure you are sending it to the right people. And be polite; a user with a little sense of humor and empathy gets a lot more response than an angry, misdirected rabid screamer.

Oh. And yes, we do pass around the more amusing complaints and have a good laugh at them. ("Good lord! Someone pinged Bobby's router! Let's have the perpetrator arrested and pummeled immediately!")