"Your bot has run amok on my server -- please make it stop!" the reader recently had to write Microsoft when he discovered an MSN bot making repeated attempts to fetch a non-existent file from his website. "This is causing my system to reach unacceptable loads, and is causing me financial damage. I have blocked you in my router. Let me know when you've got this bot under control, and I'll consider letting it back in ... In the few minutes since I've started this message, you've hit my firewall over 50 times! STOP IT!"

The reader had written the Microsoft address that was listed as the contact for the IP address that was attacking his server, but the response came back from Microsoft Customer Service instead of the abuse department. "Thank you for contacting Microsoft Online Customer Service," the Microsoft service rep wrote him. "I understand you have an issue with MSNBOT. I realize the importance of your enquiry. However, since your issue is related to Hotmail, I suggest you to contact our MSN Support Professional as they are in a better position to assist you in this regard. Support for MSN products and services can be found at the following Web site: http://support.msn.com/contactus.aspx. Please resubmit your inquiry at this site and an MSN support agent will contact you promptly with assistance. I hope the above information will be helpful."

Not only did the reader not consider the information to be very helpful, he decided that he would leave the block in place rather than struggle to find just who at Microsoft, MSN, or Hotmail might actually deign to help him. "I don't need snooty, destructive bots," the reader wrote. "I'm highly ranked in Google and could care less whether I'm crawled by whatever second-rate search engine this bot is crawling for. I run tightly-coded, efficient sites, and I won't tolerate anyone's incompetent spider sucking up my CPU."

The reader reiterated to Microsoft his desire that they stop bombarding his server, but when I checked in with him a few weeks later, he had not heard another peep from Microsoft or MSN. "The MSN bot remains blocked in my router for unrepentant bad behavior," the reader wrote. "My router has blocked it 5,105 times in the past week. Microsoft has this nasty habit of acting like they're the dominant player in everything, even in markets where they have single-digit share. If they ever hope to compete with Google, they're going to have to drop the attitude. I once had a minor nit with Googlebot crawling pages that I had in my robots.txt file. They were very conciliatory, and had a suggestion for a workaround until they could fix things. What a difference!"