Re: Distressing, possibly life threatening emails from free accounts (yahoo, hotmail

(a) For death threats, start by contacting the FBI (or, if you're

    not in the US, whatever org has local jurisdiction). You need to     notify the cops first. Urgently. They should advise you for     everything to follow, but if you aren't lucky to get someone     who's been down this road before, my _guess_ is that the next     step will look like:

(b) Look at the actual message headers, examine the chain of

    Received headers, track the sender as far as you can. Either     they _really_ emailed from {yahoo, hotmail, etc} or they forged     those addrs from elsewhere, in which case track down the owner     of the IP from which they forged the email (whois can help).

(c) email postmaster@{domain}, root@{domain}, abuse@{domain}, for

    each domain from which the attacks came. Include complete     headers along with the messages, explain that your user has been     threatened and you're working with the {appropriate} police to     track down the offender. For detailed traceback you should (I'd     hope) need a court order to receive results, but an advance     notice that an offence has been committed, even before the court     order is in place to authorize them to release sensitive log     data, should help them to capture and preserve needed evidence.

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But you really _really_ want to consult with the relevent police agency before you take any other action; death threats are serious stuff, not fiddling abuse.

-Bennett