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Re: josh@lummox.hartley.reshall.columbia.edu
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Sending 6500 messages is wrong. Period. Out of several hundred thousand messages that have come in, only 50 people decided that a mailbomb was necessary. Out of those, almost all of them limited their actions to a few hundred messages. One person sent 1500.

The winner, by a factor of 4? Mr. Grossman with 6500 messages. Please just apologize and be done with it!

According to Joshua Grossman:
>
>
> (response below)
>
> On Mon, 19 Dec 1994, Carl Malamud wrote:
> > Your user, Joshua Grossman, has sent approximately 6500 mail
> > messages to santa@north.pole.org. A rumor was started on the
> > network encouraging people to write to santa@north.pole.org.
> > This false rumor said that this was a charity drive and encouraged
> > people to write in.
> >
> > Most people sent in one or two messages. A few people sent several
> > hundred or even a thousand. Mr. Joshua Grossman decided that this
> > was an opportunity to use his computer as a weapon and bombard us
> > with as many messages as possible.
> >
> > In most cases, we consider this to be a well-meaning denial of
> > service attack, but in the case of Mr. Grossman we can think of
> > no circumstance in which a mail bomb of that size is justified.
> > We're particularly disturbed to learn that Mr. Grossman works for
> > NBC. My group is a small non-profit corporation trying to make
> > our way on the Internet as real media. Mr. Grossman apparently
> > doesn't value our work and seems to feel his actions will make
> > a difference. The main difference Mr. Grossman has made so
> > far is to prevent thousands of letters from little boys and girls
> > from reaching the top of our queue.
> >
> > I really hope that NBC and Columbia will take appropriate actions
> > on this matter.
>
> It is nice that Mr Malamud is quite familiar with my actions. However,
> since he failed to check with me, he is missing a few details.
>
> No malice was intended. I did not use my computer as a weapon, as Mr.
> Malamud so politely puts it. When I heard this "rumor", I was interested.
> Not wanting to shut anyones system down over what is almost always a
> rumor, I email the postmaster at this site. This is the reply I received:
>
> >From generous@uucom.com Mon Dec 19 11:49:05 1994
> Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 15:43:23 -0500 (EST)
> From: "Curtis C. Generous" <generous@uucom.com>
> To: Joshua Daniel Grossman <jdg@cs.columbia.edu>
> Subject: Re: *hungry for the holiday spirit* (fwd)
>
> Yes, it is ligitimate. The project was lanuched by the Internet
> Multicasting Service out of D.C. The dime donation also applies to all
> hits to the charitable organizations which are shown on our WWW
> server ("http://north.pole.org").
>
> --curtis
> Santa's Helper
>
> According to Joshua Daniel Grossman:
> >
> >
> > Cna you verify if this is real? I would rather not be mail bombing the
> > site if it is a hoax.
> >
> > From: karma-mechanic@lsd.com (Dave Del Torto)
> > Subject: *hungry for the holiday spirit*
> > To: karma-engine@lsd.com
> >
> > Want to do a kind thing for some hungry kids this holiday season?
> > If not, press delete now. If you have a heart and a minute, read on.
> >
> > Sun Microsystems is donating $0.10 to a food bank each time an Internet
> > user sends an email msg to any (or all) of the three addresses below:
> >
> > santa@north.pole.org
> > elves@north.pole.org
> > rudolph@north.pole.org
> >
> > Doesn't matter what the msg contains; it could be an empty msg, full of
> > invisible holiday spirit. Pick your favorite and send email there a few
> > times. If *everyone* on the net were to BCC all three addresses with every
> > msg they posted to a list for one day, the counter would top out almost
> > instantly, so this is like a weird and wonderful test of Mass Human Kindness.
> >
> > You can do your part to help big fat international corporations make
> > good on their Promises of donations to charities. It only takes 250,000
> > msgs to reach the $25,000 Sun promised to donate to a Bay Area food bank
> > for homeless families. Other corporations are donating to selected causes,
> > including a banking firm in Washington DC that will donate up to $5,000 to
> > the Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage (only 50,000 msgs...li'l baby
> > birdies...furry baby rabbits... c'MON now! :)
> >
> > Other corporations are participating too: any firms wishing to add matching
> > funds should contact Luther Brown at <elfmaster@north.pole.org>. The
> > announcement's in the Dec 94 Advanced Systems magazine (pg 22). Who knows,
> > someday you might see companies all across the globe donating part of their
> > obscene profits to children's charities in Sarajevo, San Francisco, Manila,
> > Mogadishu, Bombay, Moscow, Port-au-Prince, Bucharest, Shanghai, Rio de
> > Janeiro... everywhere Santa stops in.
> >
> > Remember: any user can send multiple msgs, so please be counted at least
> > _once_, OK? There are not many such opportunities to directly affect
> > something with your computer, and it doesn't take the Compassion of
> > Siddhartha to see what's good about putting food in the mouths of little
> > children with no home, wherever they are.
>
> With confirmation from the *postmaster of this site*, I considered this
> valid.
>
> It may also be noted that no mention is made in any of these posts that a
> reply will be sent, implying that it might be a simple counter, which
> could accept far more mail that an autoreply system without trouble. No
> mention was made of any other purpose for this address other than to
> count incoming mesages for donation purposes. My original "test" send
> received no reply initially, (it arrived 2 days later), appearing to
> confirm this.
>
> A later post was made from *the same organization*, saying the email gag
> was a rumor, but there was a web site. I immediately discontinued
> sending email. Investigating the web site, I found through it's own
> messages that the web site was valid ($.10 donated per touch to the
> site), but no mention of any email donations. This seemed to imply that
> the second poster was correct, and the postmaster incorrect; or,
> otherwise stated, this company has little idea what each of its hands were
> doing.
>
> Nevertheless, long after I had ceased emailing, Mr. Malamud chose not to
> contact me seeking an explanation or apology or a (belated) cessation, but
> instead emailed yourselves. My apologies to you folk for any
> inconvenience. My apologies to anyone whose mail was delayed or othewise
> inconvenienced, and to the net at large for the use of bandwidth for
> what turned out to be no purpose. I apologize to the company which is
> running this service with the qualification that they should get their
> act together and decide what service they are running. I do not apologize to
> Mr. Malamud, explicitly, as has acted purely on assumptions and was
> considerably insulting on the phone (I called him) before he abruptly
> hung up.
>
> --josh grossman
>
> PS: Sorry to have you to read all of that.
>
>

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