I know the beOutdoors spamming incedent is an old issue, but I thought you might be interested in reading this message I posted on n.a.n.e. Also, I got the original lie they told mixed up, but please note that no one was fired as a result. (The original beOutdoors lie is at the bottom as a refresher.)

Hello!

Boy are you going to be glad that you are reading this. I used to work at beOutdoors.com until very recently.

I know the real story about what happened with that whole spamming incident.

There was never a young IT guy who was fired and broke into the building and spammed a bunch of people, but I think you already knew that.

Karla Story is the Director of Business Development, but more importantly, she is the best friend of the wife of Randy Hoffman, President of beOutdoors.com and former Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Represenstatives. Karla purchased a CD containing 30 million names and email addresses for $110 for the express purpose of spamming them. Apparently, it seemed like a viable advertising campaign at the time.

Geng (James) Qu, formerly of KPMG, now Director of IT at beOutdoors.com, wrote a program for Randy that would automatically send a mass email to batches of about 25,000 addresses at a time. They specifically pulled out AOL addresses since they were a Gold Anchor tenant in AOL Shopping.

Randy would come into the back room (Oh, I forgot to mention that at the time they were located in a strip mall and 14 people worked there - so much for their "very secure location". Also, some of the servers were down in the LA area at a place where there is no way in hell this would happen.) and say, "Let's run off the next 25,000." The rest of us knew they were doing a big mailing, but we thought that they were sending things only to registered users. Besides, the Director of IT was our entire IT department at the time.

Later when James noticed that we were getting a lot of bounce backs, he attributed it to server problems. Another employee showed him the thread (yours) regarding this spamming incident.

James had no idea that Randy had put out that bogus story about a break-in. Right away he knew that it would come back to haunt them. As I mentioned, they had no IT people other than the Director of IT. Also, the only person who had been fired prior to that was a graphics person, and it hadn't been a recent firing.

I know that this is an old issue, but as you are the self-proclaimed blight upon all spammers, or something similar, I thought that you might still be interested.

By the way, just so that you don't think I am a disgruntled employee who is making this up, I wasn't fired. I gave them a full two weeks notice like a good employee would.

However, if you are interested in hearing many more examples of the lack of integrity at beOutdoors.com, I would be more than happy to oblige. I never signed a non-disclosure agreement.

Enjoy!

From Exodus:

We have contacted our customer regarding your "beoutdoors.com" spam complaint. Below is their explanation describing the situation. Between Friday evening May 5, 2000 and Monday morning, May 8, 2000 there was unauthorized use of beOutdoors assets and its Internet access that resulted in the sending of unsolicited commercial email to an unknown number of email addresses. This was done without any authorization or knowledge of any company manager. Specifically sometime Friday evening May 5 one of our young technical employees (now ex-employee) and a friend of his entered the beOutdoors facility (without authorization) and set up an email program on an internal server to send our cash sweepstakes announcement to email addresses contained on a CD the employees friend had acquired. We are unable to determine the number of emails sent or to whom they were sent since three of our internal servers crashed as a result of the individuals unauthorized use. Based upon complaints we do know that many individuals received several copies of the email. Due to the crash of our internal servers it has taken us a little over a week to become fully operational again and complete our investigation to determine if there was criminal intent. After a discussion with the District Attorney�s office and the individuals who perpetrated the email disaster it appears that there was no criminal intent just misguided, unauthorized actions by two very immature individuals. The employee was terminated but not prosecuted. We want to apologize to Exodus and any others that may have been impacted in anyway by the unauthorized actions of a now former employee. --- -- Eric Uratchko Policy Enforcement Specialist Exodus Communications, Inc. 1-888-2EXODUS, Ext. 7700 -- Kathleen Policy Enforcement Manager Exodus Communications, Inc. 1-888-2EXODUS, Ext. 3984 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/