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.

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