Indie filmmaker Peter Hall's digital nightmare began on the morning of 6 August, when he sat down at his computer to log on. Hall had worked on his new movie for more than four years, and the premiere date was looming. He needed to check his email and send out some important messages. There were interviews to set up and meeting dates to confirm.
He tapped in his password for EarthLink, his ISP, but he got an error message. He tried again. Same message. "Damn!" he thought. "I don't have time for this." He tried again. Nothing. He rifled through drawers to find EarthLink's phone number.
After wending his way through the voicemail maze, he finally managed to reach a human. "Why can't I log on?" he asked. The answer, as Hall relates it, came from a front-line support person: "Because you broke your subscriber agreement." EarthLink, he learned, was convinced that he had sent out thousands of spams a few nights earlier.
"I was in shock," he said. "I don't even know how to copy a message to someone. I have to cut and paste to send the same message to two people, and they're telling me I'm a professional spammer?"
He told them he had been a customer in good standing for a year and a half. And he said he was a known filmmaker with limited computer skills, and he could provide evidence that he couldn't have been the culprit, that he wasn't even working on his computer on the night in question. But to no avail. At first, EarthLink officials wouldn't even consider the possibility that they might be mistaken. "It's his word against ours. He spoofed the headers and sent out a ton of email ... we would not cancel someone's account without proof," EarthLink's vice president for corporate communications, Kirsten Kappos, said the next day.
But EarthLink was mistaken. Hall never sent out any spam. It turns out that somehow, some digits in the IP address of the actual spammer got transposed, and Hall's computer was erroneously identified as the source of the spam. After two days of queries from Wired News, EarthLink owned up to the mistake, chalking it up to its intense fight against unsolicited commercial email.
"We are offering Mr. Hall our profuse and public apologies," Kurt Rahn, EarthLink's PR manager, said Tuesday. That's quite a switch from a few days earlier, when they were telling Hall not only that he was in gross violation of his subscriber agreement, but that he had no recourse. "They told me, 'Too bad, there's no appeal,'" Hall said. "I was treated like a pariah."
EarthLink officials say they're sorry if Hall was treated badly, but they have no sympathy for spammers, and they were convinced Hall was among the worst kind - one who forged headers and spammed a list of thousands of America Online members.
Hall is "one of the casualties of the spam wars," said Steve Dougherty, vice president of Internet operations at EarthLink. He should know. In the spam wars, EarthLink is on the front lines. It was one of the ISPs that successfully fought to cast off Cyber Promotions' Sanford Wallace last year. Since then, EarthLink has stepped up the enforcement of its email-abuse policies. But it still finds itself the object of scorn from anti-spammers. "I still get shitloads of spam from EarthLink," one of them wrote on Usenet.
EarthLink redirects the blame upstream - to UUNET, EarthLink's backbone provider. "UUNET made a mistake," said Dougherty. It was UUNET, he said, that transposed the numbers and reported that Hall was the spammer. UUNET declined to comment.
But it wasn't UUNET that yanked Hall's Internet account; nor was it UUNET that proudly broadcast Hall's email address in anti-spam newsgroups as yet another spammer brought down by EarthLink. That was Harris Schwartz, EarthLink's head of security, who boasted in Usenet that EarthLink has "caught and taken action against" more than 1,100 alleged spammers since May 1996.
Some people at EarthLink said Schwartz often goes over the line in his fight against spammers. Hall said that when he talked to Schwartz, he felt as if he were being threatened. "He told me that what I had done was an FBI-level event, even though he never said he was actually going to call the FBI," Hall said. "I was kind of scared."
Schwartz refused to comment.
Apologetic as the folks at EarthLink may be, they aren't letting this incident get in the way of their war on spam. "Basically, spammers are toast," said Rahn. But, he added, some of EarthLink's policies will now come under review. "We're going to look at our screening process before we kick people off," Rahn said. The company will also consider dropping the practice of broadcasting spammer kills in Usenet.
Hall said the whole incident has left him "kind of stupefied. But I'm elated that I was able to prove my innocence."
His movie, Delinquent, opens on 12 September in New York and Los Angeles.
