Full version Downloads: About Email Bombing

Mail-bombing is something that takes place on the Internet almost
every day. There are a variety of motivations behind mail-bombing.
Most mail-bombings result from a newsgroup posting that did not agree with
the mail-bomber's opinion. The definition of mail-bombing is independent
of the motivations behind it. Mail bombing is sending an excessive amount
of unwanted email to another party. This email is often times, but not
necessarily, the same message repeated over and over again. How much email
is "an excessive amount"? Whenever the receiving party decides it is an
excessive amount. If you are going to send many email messages to another
person, you should make sure that person doesn't mind receiving them.

If you are planning on mail-bombing somebody, there are many things of
which you should be aware. First of all, your Internet Service Provider
(ISP) will not appreciate you sending mail-bombs through their machine(s).
This is because most ISPs don't like abnormal activities taking place from
their machine(s) and/or don't want the increased load on *their* system.

If you are mail-bombing a particular person, you are also impacting
their ISP. If you fill up that computer with repetitive mail to the
person you are bombing, you are also preventing all the other users
on that system from receiving mail. If you fill up the hard drive of
a mail server, that machine may have to be taken down to have the
problem fixed -- interrupting service for all the users. Even if you
do not send enough email to fill up the system, you are still degrading
its performance for all users.

Now, sometimes mail-bombing is targeted at a specific machine and not a
specific user. Maybe this mail-bombing is designed to slow down or fill
up the destination machine. Maybe everything in the previous paragraph
is what the mail-bomber wants to happen. Unfortunately, whether the mail-
bombing is targeted at a system or a person, there are many other negative
consequences.

For many ISPs on the Internet, there are other companies that will accept
mail for them as a backup in case something happens to their system. These
are called mail-exchangers. For example, let's say that you send mail
to 'a@z.com'. If 'z.com' is unreachable or not currently operational,
that mail might be sent to 'y.com'. This would make 'y.com' a mail-exchanger
for 'z.com' -- 'y.com' has to be configured so that it will know to ultimately
give that email to 'z.com' as soon as it is reachable. This will many times
continue several levels on the Internet -- with maybe a 'x.com' that will
accept the mail if both 'y.com' and 'z.com' are down.

How does this affect a mail-bomber? Well, if a mail-bomber does successfully
crash or fill up the target machine, a mail-exchanger will accept the mail
instead. Often times, these mail-exchangers are run by the ISP's ISP (yes,
Internet Services Providers also need to have an ISP). Usually, this larger
ISP has exponentially more customers than the ISP that you targeted.
Although it may be totally unintentional, your mail could fill up and crash
this mail-exchanger. This will probably affect thousands of customers, as
opposed to the hundreds of customers usually affected by filling up a small
ISP. This can continue up the line until you could potentially crash a large
part of the Internet's mail servers.

The worst part is that every time one of the smaller ISPs delete the mail
and empty their hard drives and come back online, the higher mail-exchangers
will notice that the computer is available again. The mail-exchangers will
then send all the mail that it has been holding for the target computer,
possibly filling it up once more. This computer could actually be one of
the mail-exchangers caught in the middle of the big mail-exchangers and the
system you are mail-bombing.

There are very few people in the world that would want to affect any
systems besides the target of their mail-bombing. But, because of the
way the Internet is set up, this is impossible to prevent. This means
that mail-bombing is definitely *not* a solution to whatever problem
you may have with the target person or system.

So, what can you do instead of mail-bombing? Well, if the reason you want
to mail-bomb somebody is because they said something that irritated you
or did not fit with your beliefs, you may want to stop and act your age.
If somebody says something that irritates you, you can always just ignore
them. If you really want to, send *one* reply back to them pointing out
why they irritated you. Take care of the problem in a logical and civilized
way.

If you have a more legitimate reason for wanting to mail-bomb somebody,
there are alternatives. If it is a person that has done something to you,
you can report them to the proper authorities. If what this person did was
serious, but not illegal, you may want to report them to their ISP. If
what this person did was not serious enough to even report to their ISP,
then you should probably consider just talking it over with the individual.
If you do want to report a person to their ISP, there is one method that
will usually work. Let's say the person's email address is
'person@aabb.com'. In many cases, you can simply send email to
'root@aabb.com'. This will almost always get to the system administrator
for whatever system this person uses for their email. If this doesn't
work, follow the URL at the bottom of this document for more info.

If you have a problem with a system or that system's administrator, you
may want to try contacting *their* ISP. You may have to get somebody
that knows a decent amount about Unix to find this information for you.
If you have access to a Unix machine, you can try yourself. At the
Unix prompt, type in the command 'nslookup'. Then type 'set type=MX'.
Then type the last part of the system administrator's email address,
i.e. "aabb.com.". Make sure to put a '.' at the very end (i.e. after
com or net). If this method is going to work, you will see one or more
lines displayed. On the right, you will see mail exchanger = computer name.
These are the names of the mail-exchangers (and probably the ISP) of
the offending computer. You can try sending email to 'root@computername',
or if the entry looks something like this:


   aabb.com    priority=XXX, mail exchanger = hello.zzzz.net

then you should send mail to both 'root@hello.zzzz.net' as well as
'root@zzzz.net'. Most people are surprised that they will actually get
a real human response from these email addresses. Often times, these
people will know more about the offending ISP/System/System Administrator
than you do.

Please let others know about the negative side of mail-bombing as we
move the Internet to a place where mail-bombing is no longer a concern.
Part of free speech is being able to post in a newsgroup without being
mail-bombed the next day. Also -- many ISPs are not big, rich
companies. Many of them are people barely making a living in a new
and unpredictable market. Even if the ISP you affect is a large one
that makes a lot of money, hurting that ISP can also hurt the small,
struggling ISPs that are below them.

I have provided a link below to a wonderful
page that describes what to do if you have been mail-bombed.