Spam Attack!

If you have been spammed, my sympathies

As of 1/3/97, thousands of forged, undeliverable email messages began flooding my system. Several million have reached innocent victims. If you have been annoyed by them, believe me, so have I!
This page will give you a little background on this unfortunate incident, which disabled this site for over 10 days.

Instant Home Pages

I have been pleased to offer free Web pages to just about anyone. "The Rules" that must be agreed to establish an account are simple:

Account info must have correct and current email address
No illegal content
Use good netiquette when publicizing your page
Update periodically, or Joe may consider your page abandoned
One free page per customer
Joe may delete any page, change or discontinue service altogether, at any time
Over 1,000 people have taken advantage of this service. The vast majority have respected the rules to which they agreed.

One Bad Apple

One person elected to promote his page intially by spamming newsgroups. In email correspondence, he apologized and seemed unaware of what "good netiquette" entails. His account remained intact.
Recently, the same account was promoted via an email spam campaign. As in the first incident, this generated a good deal of hate mail directed at yours truly. I informed the party that this time his account would be deleted.
The response was swift, massive and ugly. It included threats, forged messages to spam lists, and mail bombs. Enraged victims have mounted mail, ping, syn, and other attacks on joes.com, incited to vigilante justice by the forger.
My sympathies if you have been inconvenienced by this unfortunate incident.
Sincerely,
Joe Doll, Proprieter
Joe's CyberPost

More Details and References

This incident is perhaps the most extensive event of its kind yet perpetrated on the net. Even professional spammers, who frequently find themselves pressed to defend (and cease) their practices, have found themselves taken aback at the practices used here. Particularly unsavory aspects of this case include:

Forgery
Advertised refusal to remove names from mailing lists
Threats of forged spam against anyone who dares to "flame" the spammer
Use of addresses from a professional spammer's "do not send" list

Despite the confusion, many netters researched the evidence and figured out what was actually happening. Many stepped in to take corrective action by posting to newsgroups and intervening with the real principals involved. Mark Welch is particularly exemplary in this regard. He has written an excellent summary article from his perspective titled The Weekend IBM.NET Almost Died. Mr. Welch continues to update this article at his own site.