I need advice on how to trace an e-mailed message.

I did not expect such a quick response on this subject...Thank you all for your insights. I definatly agree that mud slinging is bad practice, and it is not my intention to sling any at them. I do, however, want to collect viable data and evidence that they are using un-fair practices to deliver to the authorities. As for revenge I don't wish to put that across to anyone, I am not violent in nature, and don't want to be. I know that my business will prevail and they are destined for a long rough road ahead as they are slinging the mud publicly, for the moment they are winning as our subscriber recruiting has dwindled to about 2 or 3 a month. We oficially opened our doors on the 8th of March and through May we averaged 1 a day. As for losses...do the math I believe we have broken the $5000 mark if that is what it takes to get the authorities involved. My overhead is over 6000 a month not counting paying ourselves, or the initial investment, and we are not even pulling in a tenth of that yet, I think you will agree...if you visited my site...http://www.ripinternet.com ...that we are covering all of the bases including handing out fliers at local events, and visiting at local places such as the barber shop, convienience stores and such. We are really working hard to generate business, but the general rumors and public gossip has us labled as thieves and liars, even playing on our name RIP Internet (Richardson Internet Providers) as we are stealing from the public with lies about our abilities and expertise. To put it in a nutshell, they are sorry that they did not think about running in fiber cable and we have exclusive rights to that cable and they would have to come to us to connect to that cable....

We will ultimately prevail...if we don't go broke first...

I can give you one advise that'll surely pay off: lose the blinking text on the mainpage

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=229494

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Originally posted here by abbasali
Spams can be a pain in the backside. To circumvent this issue, I use the following two programs 'eMailTracking Pro' and 'VisualRoute'. These are neat little toys to drill down to the originating IPs. You already have the logs. So, give it a shot and you might have more specific data for the proper authorities.
Hope this helps!
Abbas

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VisualRoute 6.0 will do the trick for tracing. Go to www.download.com and get the trial version to check it out. After you establish their identities, contact the authorities. If, upon further investigation, it turns out that THEY have been hacked in a manner that makes them appear to be the source of your woes, you've picked up a mighty fine marketing tool to sway their customers in your direction. After all, who wants an insecure, or unethical for that matter, ISP? Best of luck to you!

You may wish sending a semi-formal letter to your competitors telling them that 'rogue employees' at their company may be attempting to attack your company. (As long as you are sure that it isn't individual public subscribers to their ISP who are doing it.) The management of the other companies may crack down on rogue employees, or may think twice, depending on the actual situation.

More advice on your wepage...

1. Fix your DNS server so that http://ripinternet.com works as well as http://www.ripinternet.com . You don't want a user to make a mistake and thing that your site is down or a fly-by-night outfit.
   
2. Are you planning a front page redesign? The color scheme is just a little bit strange with dark grey and dark green text at one point... Have you considered changing the site to something a little more...well... personalized? Do you have a logo for your ISP? Have you decided on a consistent look/feel/color scheme?
   
3. One thing you might wish to do is change the pages so that they do not use the default link scheme of Internet Explorer, which is Blue links, Purple visited links. It looks strange.
   
4. It would be useful to change (with javascript) the form on 'sign-up' so that the enter key does nothing, thereby eleminating partial-submissions.
   
5. http://edison.ripinternet.com/ seems to be down.
   
6. I notice the explanation for Fiber vs Copper
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   Imagine if you will a piece of copper wire (the size of a single strand of your phone cord wire). Imagine if it is five feet long. If you use a device called an impedance or Ohm meter you can verify that there is a measurable amount of resistance in the wire. This resistance increases the longer the wire gets. So basically a ten foot wire will have twice the impedance or resistance as a five foot wire. This impedance or resistance is what slows down the transfer of data through the wire.

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   You may wish to 'dumb it down' by using the analogy of a pipe which has a smooth or rough inner surface. I know some people who will think that an Ohm is a measure of spiritual enlightenment. "Ohmmmmmmm....."
   
   Also, in the next paragraph... Fiber doesn't HAVE electrical resistance because it transmits light impulses, instead of electrical impulses. It's a bit misleading.
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   With a Fiber Optic cable that is Five feet long there is so little resistance that it is impossible to measure it.

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Hi Guus,
Are you refering to the animated .gif {that I despise and have voiced this to the page designer} it loads too slow and impresses me not. Unfortunatly, I do not hold controlling interest in this venture, my partner (with all the degrees in graphics design ) has the final say in asthetics. I just do the technical stuff. Although the site does have a feed back form, if enough people fill out this form then maybe he will make some changes...

P.S.
He does not know that I am dissing his creative tenure, and does not visit this site, he is a business man great with numbers and loaded with a gift of gab that can sooth the savage beast, but, he is also very sensitive to criticism from within his realm...:) Please don't reference this as I will have to deal with his also very accurate and sharp toungue. hehehe

I ment the static text, just, plain, text, that keeps blinking on the page. It's done with the 'blink' CSS keyword. For example, on top of the main page, the sentence "RIP Internet - Dallas County's ONLY Fiber Optic ISP Network" keeps blinking.

Look at Terr's post. He has some other good design-advise.

"OIC", says the blind man as he pis--d into the wind, "It all comes back to me now"

lol....I suppose that you are not using a browser that takes advantage of FrontPage extensions...that text is supposed to be a scrolling marquee.

:urinate:

Just a suggestion... download Opera from http://www.opera.com . You can use it in free mode, and it gives you an idea of what some people may use to view your website, and you can check for compatibility accordingly. The Opera folks make a big deal about how their browser (which I like) is fully standards-compliant. If a it shows up right in Opera it is probably all-browser-friendly, as opposed to "You don't have Internet Explorer? Tough."