Michael S. Cox Is A Spammer, Part 3

Just coming to this page? Read the first part of the story, and then the second part of the story.

Y'all may not believe this, but honestly, I do not like writing about Michael S. Cox and his spamming, lying ways. I'm bored, and I really hope that this is the last of it.

When I last wrote, what had just happened was:
• He'd put up a comment on the blog saying that he wanted everything taken down.
• I'd written to him privately asking him (again) what I'd said that was untrue.
• I'd looked in my spam folder for a response from him to my email (funny how all his email lands there, eh?), found it, and then posted part 2 in response.

After getting some comments from people calling me all kinds of nasty names and making allegations without basis (hmmm… wonder if I should sue them for defaming me?), I noticed that one person claimed that Mr. Cox had sent me another email. At the time I posted part 2, I hadn't seen it; after all, I had found one response in my spam, and that response didn't mention that there had been more than one, so I didn't keep looking. After seeing that comment, I looked, and found the following:

May 25, 2006

From: "Michael S. Cox" <michaelscox@poczta.neostrada.pl>
Subject: Dori
Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 09:38:09 PDT

Dori,

I spent about 10 minutes typing a final cease and desist letter, but I
thought I would go ahead and step out of defense mode for a second, and
to try and communicate with you.  What inspired this, was I was just
talking to a friend about this situation, and he was like "na man, she's
just given you a hard time, where's your sense of humor".  So I thought
about that for a bit, I don't know you, or what your sense of humor is
like.  So...  I'll go ahead and give you the benefit of the doubt, and
believe that you don't truly have intentions of leaving those statements
about me being spammer live online indefinitely, and that you don't wish
me harm.  Your are just giving me a hard time, right?

Now Dori, I contacted you about chalcedony.com, because I was sincerely
interested in purchasing it from you.  It's a cool domain that I could
definitely develop and get some good long term use out of.  I was
shocked by your response, "are you Michael S. Cox the spammer, no we
don't want your money".  So I'm reading this and thinking crap, this
person thinks I'm a spammer, I've got numerous internet assets spread
across the web, some with AdSense and Yahoo ads, so naturally I said,
"no it's someone else, if you want to sale the domain drop me a note". 
I blew you off because I don't want anyone damaging my financial assets,
specially I don't want someone heading on over to a website of mine with
PPC ads, and attempting to get me banned from one of the publisher
networks, simply stated, I don't want enemies.  Money and assets aside,
you insulted before I even had a chance to discuss the matter with you
civilly, sorry but I'm not going to fend off allegations from someone
that I don't even know, I don't have the time or energy for that, or the
need, and apparently too much pride.  I did not expect you to respond
the second email, I thought it would get you off my case, and it would
end there.  Your second email which from my point of view was far more
vehement than the first, really pissed me off, I'll say it straight. 
I'm reading it thinking "what is up with this lady"?  I then thought
"hell no, I'm not going to defend myself against this person's
allegations and insults", you insulted me Dori, but you don't even know
me.  I hate spam mailers as much as you, and I certainly don't want to
labeled one, as I'm not.

Second concern, I owned Autumn Gallery until about January of this year.
 I sold the website and domain over at sitepoint.com, as you noted.  My
fear was, and is now somewhat justified, that if you knew I was the same
Michael S. Cox, you would not believe that I don't own the website, and
you would try and damage it either by defamation, or by PPC fraud.  The
guy that owns the site, his name is Vadim, he's really nice guy, and I
especially don't want anything bad to happed to him or his website as a
result of some pointless feud that we have cooked up over nothing.

Now to the real core of the problem here.  The email over at debian, and
I'm sure it's not the only one there, wasn't spam.  Autumn Gallery had
at one point over 4000 reciprocal links in it's directory.  Now keep
mind, I was stupid enough at the time, to try and manage that all
manually, without any form of computer software, link programs etc. 
What happened, and it happened several times, is I kept sending by
mistake the same link exchange request to the same people, people that
had already linked with me.  So obviously some of these people got
annoyed, others got outright pissed off.  I wasn't doing this with
malicious intent, I wasn't marketing Viagra, I especially wasn't
marketing my own products via spam, I was simply trying to manage a
directory of links that got at one point completely unmanageable.  So,
obviously one of these people or several for that matter, sent in
complaints about getting repeated link requests.  I operated the site
for nearly 4 years, so I think it's inevitable that when you are sending
out email to clients, wholesale shops, etc, emails are going caught in
spam filters, sent to the wrong people, etc.  Autumn Gallery also had a
mailing list of about 2000 subscribers I think it was, I even had a
couple of those people say "what the hell are you sending me this email
for, and then realizing they were on the list".  So I may be guilty of
poor website management, annoying my link partners, but nothing more.

So Dori, to make a long story short, I don't spam people, and confronted
with insults from a stranger, I would just rather turn a cheek and walk
away.  I have God given right to want to protect all of my assets, I'm
just like anyone else.  I translated your initial email as "a threat to
me", and I reacted accordingly.  I have an enormous amount of hard work
and money invested in internet assets as I mentioned, I was stupid for
trying to maintain anonymity with you when it clearly wasn't possible,
but I didn't do it out of malice or anything sinister, I was just trying
to walk away from the situation without creating a enemy, without
creating any problems.

I'm sorry for what I said to you, I don't believe you are ugly.  In fact
I saw a photo, I think it was of you and husband [via Google images],
you both look like a very nice couple.  I'm actually from California as
well, I grew up in Whittier down south of you, my folks and I moved up
to Hillsboro, Oregon when I was about 10.  When I was 21 I got a
scholarship to study at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, I
fell in love with city and have been living here ever since.  Anyways,
I'm not telling you this because you are interested, it's my attempt to
put a bit of a human side to myself.

So please, we don't have to be friends, but we don't have to be enemies
either.  This is a misunderstanding that has over boiled over.  Please
remove the spammer comments about me, that's all I am asking.  There is
no need for this to escalate any further.  I really hope that you can
read this, and understand my point of view on the events as they
unfolded.  I'm doing some really cool things online [none of which
include spam :)], so please help me out here.

I hope you can fix this for me Dori.  If you could even type out a small
retract, that would be so very much appreciated.  It could say something
like "Michael S. Cox was a rude arse to me in an email, and even lied
about his identity in a lame attempt to shelter himself, but it turns
out he's not a spammer."  Or you could even just create page that says
"Michael S. Cox is asshole" if you can't forgive me for being cruel to
you.  I have sent this to you in sincerity and good faith.  Please meet
me in the middle, and let's bury our grievances.  Any other way of
dealing with this is wasted time for both us.

I await your reply,
Michael

Now see, here's the crux of the matter: he sent that conciliatory email at 9:38 am PDT, and the one with the cease and desist at 1:58 am PDT the following day. That is, the C&D was sent (and received) 16 hours later. I have to assume that the later one, the one with the threats, is the one that currently applies.

If I had managed to get to my email sometime in that sixteen hours things may have well turned out differently, but hey, I was in New Zealand speaking at a conference (a fact which anyone visiting this blog would have noticed — and I know that Michael S. Cox visited here during that time). So it goes.

As to his, "I'm really a nice guy, honest, nobody else has ever thought I'm a spammer," well, I'd like to point out a few things that contradict that defense:

Some people think that link exchange emails sent to domain owners are spam and some do not. I'm not going to get into that here. However, link exchange requests sent to public mailing lists are both spam and stupid — a mailing list is not a web site, as someone who claims to be web-savvy should know. The Jewelry Link Exchange email he wrote on 2 December 2003 was to a public mailing list for laptops running Debian, clearly not an email address that had requested to receive that kind of solicitation. And as previously mentioned, I wasn't the only one who thought it was spam, as this post to the news.admin.net-abuse.sightings newsgroup demonstrates.
As to his claim that that was an isolated incident? Not so much. Here's one he sent on 17 January 2003 to OpenBSD-Misc: Handmade Art Jewelry. Yes, another solicitation to another public mailing list.
And here's another post to the news.admin.net-abuse.sightings newsgroup, this one complaining about email sent directly to the recipent: Handmade Art Jewelry again, but this time on 8 February 2003.
But honestly, it's all just a few whiners? Here's a post to the news.admin.net-abuse.email newgroup saying that autumngallery.neostrada.pl was added to the blackholes.wirehub.net DNBSL on 31 December 2002. I'm seeing a pattern here.
But here, imo, is the smoking gun: Michael's own post putting autumngallery.net up for sale: Jewelry Website for Sale - $6,000 Per Month. The date is 3 September 2005. His own statement: "The site has been filtered out of Google Search." But I'm sure that that was also due to an isolated incident involving people who didn't know what they were doing. Oh wait, is he saying that Google doesn't understand the Web?

The only conclusion I can come to: his friends might think that he's a nice guy, but Michael S. Cox is, without question, a spammer. I'm comfortable stating that, because I'm not the first to say it. Hell, I'm not even the second or third.

On the other hand, I am not claiming that he's broken a law; as he said, he sent that email from Poland, and I know neither California nor US law apply there. He's a spammer, and a liar, and an asshole — but I'm not claiming that he's a criminal.

I exchanged email with pair.com (world's best hosting site!), btw. They notified me that they'd received the C&D and that if they received a court order, they'd have to take it down. I wrote back that if I receive a court order, I'll be happy to take it down myself — but hell will freeze over before MSC gets that court order. This looks like a pretty open-and-shut case to me.

I have not, as yet, heard from MSC's lawyer.

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