Patrick Crispen wrote:
 
>I am being harrassed by an AOL user, and I'm not quite sure what to do.
>
>At the request of several of my list's members, I recently dropped and
>filtered [log in to unmask] from my BAMAFAN list for flagrant list rules
>violations.  IFERMENT simply resubscribed to BAMAFAN using another AOL
>screen name (ZYMURGY2), and then posted a letter to the BAMAFAN list
>with the subject line "Nice Try."  I dropped and filtered ZYMURGY*@AOL.COM
>from my BAMAFAN list, and then wrote a complaint letter to the AOL
>postmaster.
>
>For the past two weeks IFERMENT has been mail-bombing me with the same
>letter over and over (the letter pretty much says that IFERMENT thinks
>that I am a "joke" for enforcing the list rules).  I wrote the AOL
>postmaster a second time to complain, but the postmaster never responded.
 
Yuck.  Truly unpleasant.
 
>Any suggestions?
 
Plenty--but none that you'd actually want to follow.  ;)  ("I am forwarding
your message to the "Internet CyberHex Black Arts Site...")  But seriously,
folks...
 
Aside from the ever-joyous "does your mailer allow killfiles," not really,
unless your postmaster is willing to write the AOL postmaster and complain
about the mail-bombing.  Or you could forward one of the posts with some
statistics to the AOL postmaster--to date I have received Xnumber of these
messages in a Y time period.  I'm very fond of the statistical approach,
and it seems to work well.  I also tend towards the Passive/Aggressive
:) approach, myself, so I would quietly remove the person and ignore all
messages from them.  Let him wonder if you're even RECEIVING his messages.
:)  Of course, after removing him twice he's on to you... but the silent
removal approach HAS led to people thinking that it is a system error.
 
I'm sure AOL is reluctant to do anything to this guy since he's a paying
customer.  I presume that the only way to get the AOL postmaster to do
anything is to convince AOL that this guy is a serious nuisance and makes
AOL look bad.  In case that is too much trouble :), and/or in addition to
dealing with (or not dealing with?) the AOL postmaster, you might want to
consider that this individual's particular brand of aberrant psychology
obviously relishes this battle with you.  Probably the most spiteful thing
you could do to this creep is to avoid giving him anything resembling
feedback.  If you ignore him maybe his overinflated ego will shrivel up
and die and he'll lose interest in harassing you.  Okay, so obviously he
has too much time on his hands and nothing better to do than harrass you,
but surely if you are uninteresting enough :) he'll find someone else to
annoy.  Hardly an ideal solution, but the best suggestion I have--sorry.
Of course if your personality tends towards the devious rather than the
passive/aggressive, you might want to take comfort in imagining the fun
of forging bounce responses to every bomb...  :) :) :)  Bad, bad, BAD
Katherine!  NO biscuit.
 
 
Katherine Villyard
Academic Computing
Texas Woman's University
Twisted suggestions in this post do NOT represent the opinions of my
employer!