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Dealing with Abusive E-Mail?
sheetzam asks: "I am the manager of the mail system for a reasonable (3000 employees) sized media company. Recently a website has decided to post the e-mail addresses of a few of our employees, and suggest readers send those people abuse. We know we have no legal recourse for removing the e-mail addresses from the offending web site. We can't filter the abusive e-mail based on header information because it is coming from many places. Our only choice seems to be to change the person's e-mail address. If this were an abusive phone call, we'd know exactly how to handle it. But e-mail is quite different. How are others dealing with this?"
You may perceive it as abuse, but it is also a chance to put across your side of the story.
The first thing to do is to route the incoming mail correctly. Many mail systems permit redirection of mail "by rule", including by content of the body of the message.
The first step is to do this is to ask all the people affected by this feedback campaign to forward these mails to a single mailbox, and then to analyse the messages for words they use. Typically, with campaign-type mails, people use very similar phrases to those used by the writer of the campaigning website. So, if the writer says, "Write to corporation X, and tell them to stop oppressing the natives of Peru", a shedload of people will write in and include the phrase, "Stop oppressing the natives of Peru!" in their message.
Set up a rule and reroute the messages to a "Unsolicited comment" file. Keep an eye on what gets through and what doesn't, and refine the approach.
The second thing to do is to take all these e-mail addresses, and create a mailing list for issues connected to your company. Get a note or two pumped out saying, "We at Megacorp X take your comments very seriously and are doing A and B about them. Please mail me, Mr Bigcheese if you have any other concerns you'd like to raise." Set up a website yourself and engage these people in debate.
If you just ignore what is happening, it is likely that a number of the correspondents will take the time and trouble to trash your reputation in the market place. Much better to manage the feedback and reach out to its senders.
"Well, put a stake in my heart and drag me into sunlight."
This sounds like the kind of question a spamming company might ask.
E.g one of the ones listed on my Shitlist.
So what is this "media" company and why are people angry enough to send abusive emails?
no sig.
You said you work on a media company. RIAA and MPAA are the incarnation of evil, and totally abuse their consumers. Some media companies just push the limits and want to make rules, such as hacking into users machines looking for MP3s , making CD's that break computers, etc. This kind of stupid things MUST be fought.
E-mail and petitions can sometimes be the only weapons regular people have to fight something wrong.
Because of this fact, added to the fact that you didn't disclose your company name, nor exactly what idoes, chances are your company really deserves it. In this case, keep your head down and just accept it.
--what happened to make some people put up a web page and to encourage people to contact these individuals in your company? this is a time honored technique with web forums and political activism, say to private companies, news people and agencies, politicians, etc. Hasn't this same thing been advocated here? Is your company and those people engaging in practices that insult or harm others FIRST, which resulted in this return email "abuse"? Or where they just picked at random for absolutely no reason to be come victims of the emails?
Legit questions not addressed in the parent post. I see neither any indication the company is the 'goodguys" or if the website is "the good guys" so far, so I have no other option than to ask for details. thanks.