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I would say that it's rare that it can be shown that a crank believes the only reason the crankery wasn't accepted by the scientific community was suppression.
"Actually" ? From your own source: "the Pope resisted all efforts to have Galileo pardoned" If the pope did say that, did he use the term "unproven", which is NOT found in your source, and if so, so what? If user148619's friend didn't believe that the only reason his thinking wasn't accepted by the scientific community was suppression, then he's not a crank? You don't even show that the creator of Autodynamics meets your criteria! (You do show that he or she is surely a "crank"!)
Galileo was warned to abandon his support of the Copernican model. Books supporting the Copernican model were banned. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was withdrawn from circulation pending correction to "clarify" that it was only a theory. Per nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06769-4 anyway.
Nope, if you read them, Elsevier's policies actually explicitly allow this ... See academia.stackexchange.com/a/177206/13044. Or just follow the link in Patrick's answer and click on "Article sharing guidelines"! They even write that "Authors can share their preprint anywhere at any time " and "updating a preprint in arXiv or RePEc with the accepted manuscript" is allowed ...
Follow-on to user21820's suggestion: Also, don't send the email from your existing email address (and perhaps even full name) which has (have) probably been designated as a spam source by many. (Too late for the OP's initial email burst, surely.)
Also, Fuzzy Logic: as a CS undergrad, I had read several articles about it, and there seemed to be no there there - I was convinced it was as not innovative at all. I asked a professor about it and he said that if I looked, I'd see that the Fuzzy Logic "scientists" only get their stuff published in their own academic journals. That's very far from a glaringly obvious red flag!
Interesting answer and comments. Two friends called me a crank fairly recently recently, and I talked to a MHP and it came up and the next time I saw them (the MHP), I was shocked when they volunteered that they had become a believer. Interestingly, I had NOT attempted to convince them.
Interesting. I've been seeing a lot of oblique citations of articles presenting a competing view to the authors' recently, in another field. IMO, unless the illegitimacy of a cited work is quite firmly established, it should be cited properly. If it appears to be legitimate work, oblique citation is improper, even if the conclusions appear likely to be incorrect. (Caveat: haven't read the papers.)
