Microsoft: How can we help you?

How can we help you?

A friend of mine called this morning to say that, despite the spamassassin I had installed, he had received almost 2000 spam messages and whether I could help. Not certain how one could receive suddenly so much spam I was somewhat bewildered and took an eager look. The spam turned out to be legitimate system messages of servers stating that the user-id was wrong, did not accept mail from unknown sources etc.

What had happened is that someone had hijacked his e-mail id to send bulk mail using various servers, thank goodness not ours. There is nothing much that you can do about it. The mail message was about a link to a photo to lure the innocent receiver to an url in Russia called exibonapa.ru:8080/forum/links/public_version.php  This displays a blank page so God knows what they may try and do with your system.

I spotted one of the servers to be bigfish.com. Using a whois I saw that the domain is owned by Microsoft and a bit more digging taught me that they use it for their online exchange.

Normally I don’t bother but in this case I thought to report the mail abuse by one of their clients. As their web site did not display a contact for their webmaster I thought it best to contact their customer support, trusting that they would probably forward it internally. I filled out the form and pressed submit curious what and whether they would respond. To my shock and surprise the response however was almost instantaneous:

Sorry, the page you requested is not available.

Just two days ago I had mailed the customer support of LinkedIn with the request to delete a company page. In no time they came back saying they would look into it and a day later it was done! Management is all about people and creating a suitable work culture. Nobody ever said this was easy.

• Management
• IT