TrustE Launches Trusted Spammer Program

Silverhammer writes: "InfoWorld is reporting that such luminaries as TRUSTe, ePrivacy Group, MSN, and DoubleClick are getting together to develop a "trusted senders" program to certify "commercial email" and "elevate" it above ISPs' and end users' spam filters. Why, you ask? Because they believe it's actually our fear of fraud that's hurting their response rates. Apparently all that stuff about invasion of privacy and theft of resources is just a big misunderstanding..." The Infoworld story linked above has the best information about this seal program, but CNet has another story including a quote forecasting 1400 pieces of spam per person per day in five years. Update: 01/31 17:02 GMT by M : The FTC is announcing a crackdown on spam.

Comments

Makes it easy to filter now

[Phoex]

All we have to do is filter any e-mail with this "Trusted Sender" Seal and cut them out.

Re:Makes it easy to filter now

[MoxCamel]

...until MS incorporates "Trusted Sender" seals into Exchange. Pretty soon, everyone running an Exchange server has a seal. Makes filtering on the seal pretty worthless then, unless you don't mind throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

As for effectiveness? Look at how many sheisters out there get "trusted" SSL certificates. All these seals are going to prove is that a real live person went through the trouble of designing some company letterhead in Word, and faxed it to Truste.

TrustE

[Sarcazmo]

I noticed that TrustE seems kind of spam friendly. I mean they don't require sites to have any sort of standards, they just require that they have the policies in place, and that they use them. What the policies actually are, is up to the company.

TrustE is just a shill, a fraud like the BBB, a company that makes money by getting businesses to join, and defrauding the public into thinking they have any real oversight power at all.

Truste is Irrelevant

[Ars-Fartsica]

This group could have taken a commanding role in privacy and users rights issues long ago, but instead it simply turned out to be a corporate mouthpiece.

Take a look at what it means for a site to be "Truste compliant" and you'll quickly see how worthless Truste is. To summarise - they don't care what your policy is as long as you state it publically. Well golly, I feel better already.

Oxymoron

[Restil]

"Trusted Spammer" is an oxymoron.

The only spammer I would trust is a spammer that would never send me spam because I never intentionally informed said spammer than I wanted to receive email from him, in which case, it wouldn't be spam.

Damn... I think I just logically determined that spammers serve no useful purpose in this world.

What do you think?

-Restil

so?

[hawk]

That it's the only job they can get doesn't justify telemarketing any more than it justifies prostitution, contract hits, or crack dealing.

If it ties them up longer, it makes the returns from telemarketing lower, making it a less desirable activity for the marketer.

It should be a criminal offense to make a solicitation from a phone line that does not in some way identify the call as such--so that the victims can avoid having the phone ring in the first place.

hawk

Read no further than this

[Uttles]

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is poised to announce an unprecedented law enforcement sweep against deceptive junk e-mail, also known as "spam."

Unfortunately, that happens to be the first line of the article.

Spam is not only definted as deceptive junk-email. Spam is email sent to someone in a broadcasting manner when that person has not signed up for that broadcast. In other words, if you send a message, deceptive or not, commercial or not, to a list of recipients that you don't know, that's spam.