This report of unsolicited bulk mail was answered by the sender with this message. (Because by then the basictek.com domain was listed on the Rhyolite Software list of unwelcome domains, that message is from a dccm logdir file. See also the DCC documentation.) That message showed someone reading postmaster@aschwebhosting.com was the sender of the unsolicited bulk mail.
I answered The BasicTek nonsense supposedly excusing the spam with this complaint. I sent a copy to the technical contact for aschwebhosting.com, hostmaster@ontheInter.net, because I guessed that aschwebhosting.com/BasicTek might be one of the common senders of bulk mail that hire others for technical support who are not always aware of the nature of their customers. I also published my answer in news.admin.net-abuse.email.
Michael Allen Gelman, the technical contact for aschwebhosting.com, responded with this defense of Asch.
I answered Mr.Gelman's complaint with this mail and published in news.admin.net-abuse.email.
About a week later, Mr. Gelman responded with what I understand to be a threat of bodily harm. (Because his previous message made mail from his domain unwelcome, that threat is also from a dccm logdir file.)
Contrary to his comments in that threatening message, Mr. Gelman seems to have missed the fact that more than one of Verisign's unsolicited bulk mail sending operations is listed in the Rhyolite Software list of unwelcome domains. He may also have failed to realize that there is more than one way to make mail from a domain unwelcome.
The next message from Mr.Gelman is strange. Even if I were inclined to such things, it would be rather late for me to start sending Mr. Gelman anonymous messages. In fact I have sent no mail to Mr. Gelman since my single response to his defense of Asch mentioned above. One possible explanation for that strange message is that third parties have seen the public copies of Mr. Gelman's threat here or in news.admin.net-abuse.email and are trying to stir up trouble. Another theory is that Mr. Gelman is confused or sending himself offensive mail. Yet another is that Mr. Gelman is trying to elicit a reply. Perhaps the best theory is that the message Mr. Gelman received was not anonymous, but Mr. Gelman did not realize that his threat has been published, and what he took to be a pseudonym was someone's established user name.
The next day Mr. Gelman sent this message to the main mailing list of the IETF. You can also find Mr. Gelman's message in the archives of the mailing list. If my domain name were listed on the obscure web page of an unknown crank, I would not advertise it to a very widely read and respected mailing list that is also indexed by search engines. However, I don't know much about marketing, sales, and the other arts of persuasion.
Mr. Gelman followed that message to the IETF's list with another.
Mr. Gelman has never addressed the fact that the bulk mail received from BasicTek was unsolicited except to say that none of his customers are spammers.
I still do not understand what services Mr. Gelman provided to those responsible for that spam, whether he terminated any of those services, why he cared enough about my complaints to defend the indefensible message from aschwebhosting.com, why he cared enough to threaten me, or what he expected me to do.
Other questions are answered in the list of objections about entries in the Rhyolite Software list of unwelcome domains.
Contact vjs@rhyolite.com but not this spam trap.
