To judge by the emails he's been dashing off in the early hours of the morning, Gordon Toll is one pissed off miner.

Toll is now the executive chairman and major shareholder of Royal Resources, a tiny outfit that wants to get a huge iron ore project up in South Australia. The stock is down almost 60 per cent this year, and closed on Friday at 1.1¢.

The former BHP and Rio executive was pretty candid about its performance to us on Sunday: "It's not just in the toilet – it's through the toilet and down the sewer."

Toll is also the executive chairman of a British Virgin Islands-registered company, Satimola, which was to sell a potash field in Kazakhstan (of Borat fame) to Kazakhstan Potash Corporation for $US140 million ($182 million). The deal fell over a few months ago.

A decade ago, Toll was the chairman of iron ore upstart, Fortescue Metals Group.

His stint as chairman began in 2005 and ended in 2007 while it was still in its development stage – a few years before the billions started to rush into the Andrew Forrest-founded miner.

Toll dumped his entire Fortescue stake before he resigned from the board – not a bad call, as it turned out. He made $6.3 million – more than four times what the parcel would be worth today.

He still recalls his Fortescue time fondly.

That said, in June Toll took Forrest's recent tantrum to its logical conclusion – he unleashed on executives and shareholders in Andrew Mackenzie's BHP Billiton, Sam Walsh's Rio Tinto, Murilo Ferreira's Vale and Twiggy's Fortescue for expanding their iron ore production.

"Both the executives of these companies and the shareholders are showing massive ignorance of major economics and market structures," said Toll, the charmer.

And the war continues – now over email.

Last Thursday, this missive was fired off to Brendan Pearson's Minerals Council of Australia over its new website Iron Ore: Facts – itself a response to the Fortescue-backed Our Iron Ore website.

Here's the email in full:

"Your new web site is the greatest collection of intellectual dishonesty I have seen in a long long time.

"I am prepared to go into details if your can start the scrutiny - I seriously double if you are honest enough or open minded enough to do that.

"Cheers, Gordon Toll"

Forgive the typos – he sent the thing at 3:52 am. We thought perhaps it was the dramatic end to a bender, but its turns out Toll was in Europe at the time. Gotcha.