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.

http://www.webscaper.com/inet/IAB_MailBombs2.shtml