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There is a mentally unhinged person who has been trolling me online for years, by leaving nasty comments in the comments section of articles I have written, on a blog I used to run, and now by using my university email address.
Is there anything I can do about this?
If I were to approach the university’s IT department and tell them about it, is there anyway they could identify at least where the email was coming from? The person is using an anonymous ‘protonmail’ address, and I am wondering if - in order to prove it is the same person - it is possible to determine at least the region from where he email originated. Ultimately, is it possible to block him completely?
Because he doesn’t use particularly threatening language, am I to assume I have no legal recourse against him?
Because he doesn’t use particularly threatening language, am I to assume I have no legal recourse against him?
I don't think that's right. If it's repeated unwanted contact it's still harassment so the police may be able to do something. Whether anyone can prove it's who you say it is is another matter though.
Just send me the nude pics I want and i'll leave you alone.
Get Drac to ban him
Is there anything I can do about this?
Block the email address?
Police and uni IT; don't respond - it will only feed the troll.
protonmail - not a chance of identifying where it came from. Don't respond, block it where you can
Protomail's blurb seems to be more about end to end encryption than anonymity. One their site they have an address for reporting abuse. They may respect the privacy of their users but thats no reason to expect that they willingly serve as a vehicle for harrassment - they describe their service as being 'for the public good'
They also have a page about legal and criminal matters
Post the harasser’s email address here and let the STW masses spam/harass the hell out of him..?
Sorry in of no help I'm afraid.
Just plain curiosity though, do you think you knew the person irl at some point?
Protomail’s blurb seems to be more about end to end encryption than anonymity
True, but part of the point is to remain anonymous. They don't leave a lot of info sitting around on the headers that I have ever seen. Use it on the web and like like it blocks images that can be used to track. The abuse@ is probably a good call though
There used to be a program a few years back called mailwasher. It would send an email back saying this email address doesn't exist. Not sure if it is still around, but it got rid of unwanted emails.
One person's mentally unhinged is another's normal. Just don't read their comments and delete their mails if you don't like them.
As shit as it is there's likely nothing you can do in terms of tracing the person or getting the police involved. There is no chance the police are going to spend time on it if there's no threats of violence (even then it would probably be unlikely unless you already knew the identity of the person or something had also happened outside of the Internet). Not sure if your Uni IT would look at it but there's not really anything they can do if they did. They could put a block on the sender's address at the email gateway but then you could do that just as easily on your email client so I doubt they'd bother (maintaining blacklists can be a PITA and if you start adding loads of them it just slows the gateway down).
Not chance geo-location will happen either, that would require ISP involvement (which they wouldn't do unless assisting a police inquiry).
It sucks but just trying to ignore it, blocking them when you're able and trying to not let it get you are about the only options you have 🙁
One person’s mentally unhinged is another’s normal. Just don’t read their comments and delete their mails if you don’t like them.
Just not reading the comments isn't really a solution - the comments are there for everyone reading his articles, not just him. They're presumably being put there with a view to creating reputational harm.
For your own blog posts you can exercise some control over comments - have some sort of moderation / approval in place or just switch them off. For published articles thats maybe not an option - but going forward you can possibly ask for it - ask the publisher that you're articles don't have a comment facility or for some sort of moderation to be in place for them. As the publisher they are responsible for the comments. For your own purposes its a question of whether the comments element of online publishing are important - is there a relevant and informative debate going on there, growing from and feeding back into your writing? - or is it just a visitors book?
I can understand the frustration - if someone is unhinged rather than just mean and aggrieved one of the problems is their persistence, boundless energy and the volume of material they can happily produce.
Someone of my aquaintance is in a similar position - any public posting by them gets the comments section filled with rants and slurs on top of which there are blog sites and social media profiles heaving with train-of-thought ranting spleen which just by their sheer volume and word-salad end up floating to the top of any search results relating to him, his home town or any of his business activities. And this isn't even behind any mask of anonymity - its a member of their own family. So even identifying he offender isn't necessarily a step towards a resolution.
If you work in a university I bet it's somebody you know. It's a bitchy competitive environment. Got any suspicions? Drop the person some false information and see if it comes out in their abusive posts.
It's possible that the police might take action on harassment even without threats of violence; see this recent prosecution.
What about Stylometry?
I'll do some reading later if I get a chance later, but I'm sure I recall universities using tools to detect plagiarism that would probably work if you had a sufficiently sized sample.
It is highly likley this is a colleague or someone in the same field so there should be a significant body of published material for comparison.
Fuzzy, the police do not need threats of violence before investigating harassment; the circumstances do not guarantee their involvement but the actions are causing distress, attempting to destroy professional reputation and credibility.
SaxonRider, you need to take this to the police; if they decline to investigate, escalate to station commander and PCC.
Before going to the police- do you know who it is, are they in the UK? If the answer to either of these is no, on what you’ve said there’s not much that can be done by LE with someone either using an anonymous email service or outside the uk. There’s no magic button the police can use on a low level harrasment investigation to get around that problem. Maybe your hosting providers could develop some logger or Trojan horse device but that’s quite a long shot and may still be stymied by a vpn, tor, public computer etc.
ProtonMail are quite specific they don’t hold any identifying data.
“ Anonymous
No tracking or logging of personally identifiable information
Unlike competing services, we do not save any tracking information. By default, we do not record metadata such as the IP addresses used to log into accounts. As we have no way to read encrypted emails, we do not serve targeted advertisements. To protect user privacy, ProtonMail does not require any personally identifiable information to register.”
SaxonRider, this is an interesting case: BillyWires
No violence threatened, but the volume of posts constituted harrassment of the MP
If he/she/it is leaving comments on articles and/or blogs, you might be able to get the traffic logs and match the time of the comment with IPs accessing the site (You might be able to get the traffic log via the blog site management, etc).
If, IRL, you are Boris Johnson, this may not be possible due to the volume of traffic, but if it is a less visited site it might be less than onerous.
They might be using some trickery to disguise their IP but that may become apparent if you get some weird results when you try to geo-locate the IP.
This perp sounds pretty cowardly and I hope you get some solution.
Unless you're Boris Johnson.