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

Trusted Spammer Seal Makes Filtering Easier!

[Ron Bennett]

The enclusion of this so-called trusted sender seal, especially since it will likely be highly standardized, will make filtering of spam easier than ever before; and bouncing back "trusted sender" spam in bulk will be a cinch too :-)

Re:Trusted Spam?

[darien]

Spam is spam... sort of. As J*nK*tz said the other day, people don't mind spam half so much if it's something they're genuinely interested in.

I hate to admit it, but I really don't mind getting emails from ebuyer.com telling me that they're doing 256Mb DIMMs for £13 (or whatever). It's the stuff that's just blatant opportunism that angers me - where they fire off the same email to a million people on the assumption that maybe 2% of them will be interested. Even if I wanted to sign up for half of the business scams, I couldn't because I'm not in the US. And my friend Julie is getting pretty fed up with the constant stream of emails promising to show her a 100% natural way to increase the size of her penis.

So I'm reserving judgment for now. If this idea can be made to work properly then it might make life harder for these idiot address-harvesters, and hopefully provide a stable, reliable opt-out system for the email we do receive (well, we can hope). But I have to say, I'm not convinced the battle's won yet. The article says that "trusted spam" will have a seal which

will appear in the top corner of the body of the message, will contain an encrypted digital signature along with information on the valid sender and recipient and the date and time. An appliance installed at the commercial emailer's location generates the digital signature. When the consumer clicks on the seal, they are connected to the Trusted Sender computer, which verifies the digital signature.

Any Pine users care to comment?