I need to vent.... Got a couple hundred(!) spam mail from hotmail.com today. So, I gathered all the the spam and put into my junk folder. I then contacted abuse at hotmail.com and professionally and calmly asked them to stop this user from spamming myself and Real Time's networks. I attached 2 messages with full headers with the explicit label -sample- of the spam and I could send a complete report if more info was needed. To my surprise I got a response from a human! (yes I still got the auto-response thing that is useless too). The curtly informed me that 2 messages does not constitute a spamming. Hmmm... I thought, you are right, -1- message is a spam! But I bit my lip, getting a human to respond from hotmail is rare and I didn't want to blow the potential that someone actually cares about spam. So I responding, say that was a sample of the spam, and to find a complete listing of with headers of -all- the messages. I attached each of the 573(!) messages as attachments (this is important). I do this so 1 message can contact all the evidence of spam and you can just view the attachments. This is how I personally like to get complaints to abuse at real-time.com. What do I get back? The little prick tells me -not- to spam him! Ok, I've been an admin long enough to know =not= to pound the reply key and vent. But it's ironic. He tells me 2 messages are not spamming. I send 1 message (ok with 573 attachments) -but- still 1 message and it's spam. I chilled out a couple of hours. Apologized(!) and said I would just like to work through the problem and resolve the issue. I'm talking to a human after all and it's a rare blah... blah... blah... What does he tell me? The message all have forged headers. Oh, boy. Like I cannot read an SMTP header to see that it's -not- forged. Damn! I just want to black-hole all of hotmail.com. -- Bob Tanner <tanner at real-time.com> | Phone : (952)943-8700 http://www.mn-linux.org | Fax : (952)943-8500 Key fingerprint = 6C E9 51 4F D5 3E 4C 66 62 A9 10 E5 35 85 39 D9