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I'm loathe to defend GoDaddy, but I don't know if they can be "blamed" in this case, if only because what happened here was not the typical spam scenario.

If I'm understanding the situation correctly (and if I'm not, please let me know), a crazy person with an agenda sent a mass-mailing to about hundreds atheists/bloggers in an attempt to push his POV. Skepchick reports him to his email host (in this case, GoDaddy), under their spam terms.

GoDaddy does their standard process, which includes asking for opt-in proof, and revealing the email. Crazy guy goes crazy and makes a website dedicated to trying to defame Skepchick, using info he found about her online.

The problem is, this wasn't typical spam. Meaning, this wasn't some bot sending out Viagra sales pitches or the "great investment leads" people that send me 30 messages a day. This was unsolicited mail, yes, but it was with an agenda. Basically, I'd classify it more as harassment.

I'd imagine the situation would have been handled differently if it was flagged/seen/filed as harassing messages, rather than spam. I don't know, but I have to assume GoDaddy has an abuse team and that their methods of handling this sort of thing would be different.

Please understand, I'm not putting the onus on Skepchick to correctly know how to classify the message. It stands to reason she thought this was spam. But at the same time, I don't know if this sort of edge case is common enough to require a more complex method such as SHA-1 hashes.

Shitty situation all the way around, but I think the biggest problem was this was treated as a normal case of spam, when really it was a case of abuse/crazy.




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