Battle Creek, a town of 54,000 best known as the headquarters of the Kellogg's cereal company, is on the warpath.

Robert Drewry, a Battle Creek detective, said on Wednesday he was hoping to file felony charges of computer intrusion against the person at the Orbz anti-spam service who contacted the Domino server, and caused e-mail to crash for 24 hours. "If we can identify the person responsible, yes, we will prosecute," Drewry said.

This new Battle of Battle Creek -- the first one in 1824 pitted local Indians against surveyors -- began when an Orbz computer allegedly connected to the town's mail server to see if it might be an anti-spammer bugaboo: A relay point for bulk e-mailers.

It wasn't. But it was running an old Lotus Domino version, and what would normally have been a routine test by Orbz allegedly caused the server to mail-bomb itself into a tizzy.

Cindy Hale, a systems administrator for the town, said she was the one who had to deal with the crash.

"We had to get with our Cisco expert and get into our firewall and make some changes in there and make some changes to our (Lotus) server to not accept anymail from Orbz," Hale said.

Then Hale did what has incited a feeding frenzy this week in the online communities devoted to canning spam: She called the cops. "I just called our police department and asked if they wanted to investigate any further and there we are," Hale said.

Hale's phone call and subsequent police investigation have led activists on the spam-l mailing list and and news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup to vow that "Battle Creek will soon become Battle Stations," and already has prompted talk of a legal defense fund for Orbz.

The activist at the center of this controversy, who could face up to 10 years in prison under Michigan criminal law, is Ian Gulliver, a 20-year-old systems administrator who lives near Ghent, New York. Gulliver is the administrator for the Orbz (pronounced "orb-zee") blacklist.

Created last June, Orbz is one of the newer incarnations of blacklists assembled by devoted activists fed up with clogged connections, cluttered inboxes and overflowing mail spools.

It lists about 70,000 open relays that spammers typically rely on to spread bulk e-mail. Network administrators can configure their systems to reject, discard or return any mail that comes from an address appearing on Orbz's blacklist.

Orbz claims some distinguished customers, including about 200 large institutions -- Intel and AT&T Research among them -- who regularly download the latest spammer blacklist, plus tens of thousands of individual users.

More importantly, Orbz relies on the same connect-to-a-mail-server technique that's commonplace on the Internet. The Orbz queries -- phrased in the MAIL FROM syntax -- may have given a buggy Lotus Domino server fits, but they appear to be perfectly compliant with Internet standards.

Gulliver discovered the Lotus Domino problem last year. In August, he sent an alert to the bugtraq mailing list saying Orbz had learned that its queries could "cause Lotus Domino to enter a mail routing loop and consume 100 percent CPU." (Lotus has since released a patch.)