Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: How do I find somebody else's sysadmin?
Message-ID: <1989Nov24.003000.3450@twwells.com>
Date: 24 Nov 89 00:30:00 GMT
References: <1989Nov23.034343.4663@athena.mit.edu>
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Lines: 27

In article <1989Nov23.034343.4663@athena.mit.edu> wdstarr@athena.mit.edu (William December Starr) writes:
: I've seen references in this newsgroup to the practice of reporting
: *really* egregious breaches of net.ettiquette and/or state or federal
: law to the perpetrator's system administrator.
:
: Well, I'd like to report a bozo who posted a chain letter for a "get
: rich quick" pyramid scheme to rec.arts.sf-lovers.  So, assuming the
: guy's net.ID is "joe_jerk@foo.bar.edu," how do I find out the name and
: address of the system admin at foo.bar.edu?  I suppose I could take a
: potshot and send mail to "sysadmin@foo.bar.edu" and hope to get lucky,
: but aside from that what steps should I take?  (Or should I just send
: Snail Mail off to the office of the Attorney General of the United
: States?)

If you have an address, postmaster@address will almost always
work. You can also try names like: usenet@address, news@address,
root@address, etc. For your example, try postmaster@foo.bar.edu.

BTW, that chain letter is going out on a number of newsgroups; I
guess I'll have to go through all of mine to cancel it.

I, for one, won't knowingly permit my system to be used for
criminal activity.

---
Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.com