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I can tell you from my experience that a significant portion of the spam I receive is spamvertising domains registered in Russia or China

I'll follow up to that with the following screenshot of one of my inboxes (which, incidentally, is not protected by SpamAssassin)

Sorry, I don't speak Sputnik

Most of the spam I get these days is for Russians, by Russians. I have no idea what the hell it's advertising.

You know, you can pay online without making it automatic.

You raise an excellent point. However, they (typically) stop sending paper bills in favor of email notices once you start paying them online. With postfix and spamassassin, email occasionally gets misflagged, misfoldered, or otherwise misrouted. Forgetting that a certain bill is due, or not receiving the email notice for some reason, is IMO even worse than having an automatic payment set up. The physical paper bill is just as much a part of my fiscal responsibility process as is the physical paper check.

An odd aside. My utility company, Memphis Light Gas & Water, allows customers to register online to view their current statement. I did this once after I received an erroneous Cut-Off notice. Now, every month, their online billing system sends me two emails:

a) "Your MLGW Bill is Ready" ... then, two weeks later, after they've already cashed my check...

b) "Your MLGW Bill is Overdue!"

Their system assumes that if you're signed up to receive your statement online, then you must also be paying online. The online system doesn't talk to the offline system. So if you're set up to receive e-statements, but you pay by check via mail, the online system never registers a payment and will email a late notice every freaking month.

It's clunky, and doesn't do much to inspire my confidence in online bill-pay.

How about this one?

I think the Securities and Exchange Commission may turn out to be the most appropriate investigative body for SpamThru and its controllers.

Like many others, SpamThru first showed up on my radar a few weeks ago when a massive pump-and-dump stock spam campaign flooded the inboxes of just about everyone who uses email. They're still at it today, now pumping for ticker EGLY. There's no doubt in my mind that it's the same group of folks responsible for the initial run. All of these spam runs are coming solely through botnets, and the messages - and patterns of messages - share some obvious characteristics.

SpamThru and the recent barrage of stock scams are inextricably linked, I have no doubt about it. If and when the SEC investigates suspicious trading activity surrounding some of these stocks, they're likely to discover a trail that leads them straight to the folks responsible for SpamThru.

What irritates the hell out of me is that groups like the Parents Television Council generate thousands of complaints to the FCC about the fact that this clip aired on television, yet they're hosting the very same clip on their own website. A website that any kid with half a brain can find, and watch the clip. If it's so oh-my-gosh outrageous and offensive, why are they hosting a copy of it that any kid can download?

I blogged about this particular instance back in January 2005 when this first came up, Parents Television Council Hypocrites. I should note that PTC has actually removed a lot of the vulgarity citations from their site (many of the links in that blog entry are Google searches that no longer produce the same results). It's also interesting that I had to go digging around to figure out why "teen orgy" was showing up as a hot referring search term to my blog over the past couple of days.

I've mirrored the .torrent file here. I removed the spaces from the filename, but it's otherwise identical to the copy from ByteMonsoon and I'm downloading from it now.

Any other mirrors? :)