The initial message caught our attention:

At one point I had thought the Go Daddy’s abuse dept was virus infected, but later figured out it wasn’t. But their employees were leaving really nasty messages on my blog…

In recent years other larger tech companies have been caught trying to make a fake grassroots effort look like the real thing, a.k.a., astroturfing. If true, Marc Perkel’s charge could prove to be a costly PR stumble for the domain name registrar.

Perkel’s followup message to Email Battles included a couple of email attachments and a note:

When someone leaves a comment I get an email that indicates the IP address that the commenter was at. It’s also in my HTTP logs. It’s solid.

Perkel is an interested party in a dispute between Internet registrar Go Daddy, and a 600-server data center, NectarTECH. The dispute has at times been quite acrimonious, leading at one point to the suspension of NectarTECH’s domain name.

Email Battles built a clarifying timeline for the issues, and has subsequently kept an eye on the contest, as flame wars broke out at Broadband Reports, WebHostingTalk and DNforum.

With the arrival of the attachments, it appears the battle has entered a new phase. Perkel claims he received these comments on his personal blog, Marc Perkel Rantz:

  1. Hey dick the guy from go daddy that you recorded got fired all because your can’t figure out your own computer. Duma**es like you should just not use them. You ARE totally wrong but hey tell that to his kids. F***in loser your sight is a piece of sh*t too. I bet you just sit there alone f***in around on the internet all night cause you have nothing else to do with your life. Why don’t you eat sh*t and die
  2. Hey d***less if your so smart why the f*** are you calling tech support. Why don’t you go fix all your duma** problems and not call in act like and idiot and then recording people and getting them fired. Son of a b***h. I hope you feel really smart. Lets hope you and I never meet. I got your picture a**hole.
  3. I listened to the call. I under stand the issue, and how mistakes on both side were made. I see that communication on both sides were not what they should have been, but to say that an entire company should be judged by one or two peoples actions is not right. Things could have been taken care better, but I have seen worse from hundreds of other companies, and they still are great places to do business. Treat people the way you want to be treated. I hope everything is now up and running. You have a very interesting site.

Three identities, yet two appear to be penned by the same academic, while the third was likely written by a human. But all three originated from the same IP address, 64.202.160.161, over a seven hour period.

“I think it is likely that the IP address represents an office NAT address,” Perkel surmised, “so that anyone surfing from that office would show up as the same IP address.”

Perkel believes the comments are an example of astroturfing. “Go Daddy employees are posing as consumers to disparage me and NT and in favor of Go Daddy,” he says, “Some of the HTTP referers indicate that people clicked on company email links to my blog. But I can’t say that Go Daddy orchestrated it or if it was just the night crew. It’s possible that Go Daddy employees decided to do this on their own.”

Nevertheless, he holds Go Daddy responsible, “The company Go Daddy is always responsible for the acts of their employees even if they don’t know about it.”

Go Daddy VP, Elizabeth Driscoll, responds that the registrar is investigating Perkel’s astroturfing claim. Among other things, she told Email Battles she will try to confirm the physical location of the IP address in question.

As for the firing mentioned by the commenter, company policy prevents Driscoll from directly responding. But she can say that Go Daddy Spam and Abuse staff was available throughout the suspension of NectarTECH’s account, covered in a previous Email Battles report, yet was not consulted by Go Daddy Tech Support staff. And that won’t happen again.

Some posters on other sites are dubious of Perkel’s charges. RossH on WebHostingTalk says: “Maybe they are acting in conjunction with the NSA to take you down so you don’t expose the conspiracy of the NWO … You obviously pissed off some godaddy staff members …”

So where do we go from here? Even if the IP address in question turns out to be a Go Daddy NAT router, this appears to be the act of a lone gunman, spotlighting yet another Go Daddy human resources snafu.

It does, however, serve as a reminder that, when you’re gulping input on the web, you shouldn’t swallow everything you read.

Grain of salt, baby. Grain of salt.

Email Battles Backgrounder: