Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!sharkey!emv
From: emv@a.cc.umich.edu (Ed Vielmetti)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Anti-Semitism (Jew-hatred) on the network. What should be done?
Message-ID: <2364@mailgw.cc.umich.edu>
Date: 1 Dec 88 02:14:33 GMT
References: <1748YZKCU@CUNYVM> <275@acheron.UUCP> <1756AIPBH@CUNYVM>
Reply-To: emv@mailgw.cc.umich.edu (Ed Vielmetti)
Followup-To: news.misc
Organization: University of Michigan Computing Center, Ann Arbor
Lines: 31

In any sufficiently large group of people you are going to have some
who don't take email seriously.  An apporpriate way of dealing with
problems like this (harassment by mail of any sort) is to inform
people who care enough and who have the power enough to deal with
these events on a local level.  

Who should you contact?  If the harassing mail has passed through
a number of relay sites (like a bitnet gateway or several uucp
hops) then it's quite reasonable to inform the postmasters of
the sites along the way.  They may be able to check their logs and
confirm that the traffic actually moved through their systems.  
Once that avenue is exhausted, look to the technical and administrative
contacts for the site (available from the NIC whois server, doubtless
some bitnet service, the usenet maps, or via your campus NSF contact
if you're on a campus).  Try to isolate all of the services which
passed along the offending mail, and let the person responsible
for providing the service know that you are not pleased that it
is carrying such harassing mail.

It is important to be selective in your escalations.  Keep a record
of your outgoing mail and track who is helpful and who isn't.
In general, posting this sort of stuff to the entire usenet is
going to be less effective than selectively finding the person
or persons who will be offending that this kind of garbage is being
transmitted over equipment that they run and pay for.  

Identify people who take mail seriously and who are directly
responsible, that's key.  It's close to impossible to generate
any sort of mass action from the entire usenet, so if you are
seeking an effective end to the problem it's much more productive
to focus your attack.