Wired News
Write a Complaint, Get Emailbombed
5:40pm 9.Feb.98.PST
Solid Oak is under fire from a woman who says
the maker of Cybersitter Web filtering software
launched an email attack against her after she
sent it a critical message. Company officials deny
sending Sarah Salls an emailbomb, but say she
belongs to a group that has targeted the firm and
was asking for trouble.
Sarah Salls, a 27-year-old Web designer, says
she sent four emails to Solid Oak last Wednesday
accusing the company of carrying out censorship
through its filtering software. After the email was
rejected by several Solid Oak email accounts -
including support, feedback, and CEO Brian
Milburn's personal account, Salls says, she was
emailbombed on Thursday.
She says her account received more than 800
emails from support@solidoak.com, quoting her
letter with the subject line "re: your crap" and a
message "Do not send us any more e-mail!"
"It seemed like they were being immature about
criticisms of their software," said Salls. "Needless
to say, I was a little irate."
Although Solid Oak initially denied any knowledge
of the emails, officials now say they were the
result of a "frustrated technical support employee."
The company also said that Salls sent 12 emails,
not four, and her messages constituted
harassment.
"The person mentioned is not currently a
customer, runs a Web site promoting witchcraft
and paganism, and would obviously not be a
potential Cybersitter user," Milburn said via email.
"She is an admitted member of a group that has
been engaged in a campaign of organized
harassment against us for 14 months."
The "emailbomb" is, in part, a continuation of Solid
Oak's longtime war with the Peacefire
organization, which was started by teenager
Bennett Haselton to discuss filtering systems and
their relationship to morality and censorship.
Cybersitter, for example, blocks homosexual and
feminist organizations' sites.
Salls said she sent multiple emails only after her
initial emails, which identified her affiliation with
Peacefire, were rejected. Milburn confirmed that
any email sent to Solid Oak with mentions of
Peacefire or its founder is routinely bounced.
The Cybersitter software blocks Peacefire's Web
site and, in at least one case, a story about the
criticism leveled against Cybersitter. An article
that ran in CNET's News.com last Friday about the
Solid Oak emailbomb is now being blocked. A visit
to the story using Cybersitter turned up the labels
"NETPORN," "gay rights," "annoy.com," "adult"
and "now.org" - but no story.
"When you're talking about Solid Oak software,
there's no point in even discussing how it's weird
or ironic or doesn't make sense - everyone knows
that already," said Peacefire founder Haselton.
"The question is whether they did something illegal
this time."
In a semantic twist, Solid Oak also argues that the
400 emails it admits to sending don't constitute an
emailbomb; and when asked to elucidate the
difference between an emailbomb and 400 emails,
company spokesperson Marc Kanter said, "a
mailbomb would be an anonymous posting when
everything would happen at once, this was 400
individual email replies from unique IP addresses."
Milburn provided this clarification: "Emailbombs
have been typically continuous and anonymous;
there was no attempt to disguise who this thing
was coming from."
But according to MCI - the upstream provider for
Sall's Internet service provider, Valinet - this attack
is indeed being considered an emailbomb, albeit a
small one. The matter is "being investigated," said
Robert Hoskins, an MCI spokesperson.
This incident also isn't the first complaint that has
arisen about Solid Oak's alleged email responses
to critics. Several Peacefire members (including
Haselton and Lindsay Haisley) have complained of
receiving four-megabyte to five-megabyte junk files
in response to criticism they sent to Solid Oak
email addresses.
Milburn says the company initiated a response
program for a short period last year called
"Terminator" - through which critical emails sent to
Solid Oak would receive a reply demanding that
the sender stop sending email to the company. If
they responded to the Terminator, they would
receive a 500k Zip file of junk.
"They replied to an automated account that we
told them not to reply to; they did it to
themselves," said Milburn, chuckling.
Milburn said he personally receives "hundreds" of
messages from Peacefire, and that his company
will not respond to any criticism leveraged by its
members. The average Peacefire member is 15
years old and, Milburn said, since kids aren't Solid
Oak's customers, their complaints just don't
count.
"They aren't of an age that they can make a wise
decision about things like that; they're also at the
age where they're hackers, and things like that,"
Milburn said. "They seem to think that on the
Internet they're the same as everyone else, and
that they can demand that we respond to them."
Milburn said Salls is "entitled to her opinions," and
though Solid Oak doesn't "condone" the mass of
email the company directed at her, he believes
that she asked for it. "You have to use some
common sense. Was she interested in the
software, or was she trying to cause a problem?"
Salls said her ISP, Valinet, is consulting both its
lawyers and upstream provider MCI about the
incident.
"It's so unprofessional - all companies are going to
get some kind of criticism of their product at some
point or another. It goes with the territory," said
Salls, who calls Solid Oaks' allegations
"laughable." "I just want to bring some awareness
to this, and I guess I'll just have to use my big
mouth."
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Janelle Brown
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