Email from a stranger
Update (24 June 2010): In response to a polite request from the owner of the email account in question, I have decided to redact the offending email address from this entry.
It’s amazing what some people will say to a complete stranger via email. For example, I received the following yesterday evening:
From: [redacted]
Date: Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 21:58
Subject: ott.forsale is dead, dude
as the title reads … stick you charter up a crev-ass
As far as I know I have never met [redacted]. While I am responsible for posting the various ott.* newsgroup charters, I don’t post one for ott.forsale because it’s not an official ott.* newsgroup. (It was replaced many years ago by three more focused groups, but some poorly managed news servers still list it.)
To [redacted], I say this: enjoy the spam, dude.
AKA Keeper of Maps, I'm a geocacher who lives in Ottawa, Canada.
this is my email address, (and my family name!!) this is not a posting / email that i have made. i am unsure why this posting appears on your website !! please remove this information, and it isn’t something that i am responsible for. btw; i have no clue who you are either, so pleassssse remove what you have here. thank you.
I went back and looked at the message and it appears to have originated from a Sympatico IP address. There were two messages from your email address, actually. The other one was about three months prior to the one I quoted above, but it wasn’t quite as rude.
Perhaps someone else in your household sent the message without your knowledge?
i am a responsible net user, and a considerate one. this is very upsetting to me, friend. i have no idea who you are; what ott is, what a charter is, nor why anyone in our household, or anyone with access to my computer at my business would care. i am completely befuddled by all of this. i would simply ask that you be fair to my situation and remove the link. the material you are referencing is what, two years old or something? i don’t know what this is all about. what i do know is that i don’t want someone googling my name or my email address and referencing your posting. regards in advance, and thank you.
Fair enough. I’ll redact your name and email address from the entry.
ott is the name of a hierarchy of newsgroups related to Ottawa. My guess is that someone with access to your computer posted a message in one of the ott.* newsgroups that ran afoul of the ‘bot that enforces the charters of the newsgroups and didn’t like the fact that their message would have been cancelled as a result.