Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Going After Hotmail Spammers
Mirkon writes "Quoth The Register: "Microsoft has targeted spammers with a lawsuit aimed at bulk mailers who harvest email addresses of Hotmail subscribers in order to bombard them with junk." Details are apparently sketchy at this point, but it's nice to see America's favorite monopoly putting its power to good use." The original news.com.com story is slightly more informative.
Now they are going to go after themselves?
I created a hotmail account as a test purpose. I picked as odd a combination of names and letters I could, to the maximum allowed. I never used the account, nor told anyone about it.
One month later the box was *filled* with spam. My guess is that MS itself sold the account to spammers.
So let's see them go after themselves and fine themselves heavily. Or better yet, put themselves out of business.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Now if I could only get hotmail to stop spamming me. About once a month I get spam from hotmail under the guise of 'hotmail member services'. These junk emails have ads for all sorts of things, have little to do with the opperation of my email, and are annoying.
You can't block this address (staff@hotmail.com), and there is no 'opt out' other then to stop using the hotmail service.
Mildly tolerable and acceptable if you are getting the email for free, but unacceptable if you sign up for a years service and pay them. Needless to say, I did not renew my pay subscription.
The Internet is generally stupid
Yessssss!!!!
I also use hotmail, and their filters are not as good as Yahoo's, because you cannot filter on message content, only header. I get an average of two spams a day in my hotmail account. I wish MS/hotmail would improve their inbox filtering, but I am glad to see them doing something about the problem.
I have no problem siding with the Borg on this one!
My rights don't need management.
*cringe* it is almost too hard to say but...
Yay for Microsoft!
*ugh* that was hard. And it still hurt to say.
NoKey.
I'm sorry, but my kharma just ran over your dogma.
given that apparently every word in the dictionary is registered as a hotmail email addy (so i read somewhere), a spammer could just run thru a dictionary and stick an @hotmail.com suffix and mail it, in fact... u could prolly just use an incremental brute algorithm and prolly get 100% hits upto about 5chars. i do suspect that microsoft sell there hotmail members email addresses, as someone posted earlier about an inbox being spammed even when it hasn't been given out, i've tried this too. uni diploma's is a popular one ;)
One month later the box was *filled* with spam. My guess is that MS itself sold the account to spammers.
Microsoft actually might be at fault there. Spammers have been bruteforcing honeypot domains for a few years now, sending spam to any and all combinations of letters and numbers. what doesn't bounce gets added to a "cleared" list and passed along, so the spam accumulates from there.
> My guess is that MS itself sold the account to spammers.
The spammer probably used the dictionary-like-attack described in the Register article to guess your address. I receive all mail sent to my domain regardless of the address. I am the first and only owner of the domain, yet I receive spam sent to addresses I've never used. The spammers are clearly not bothering with harvesting addresses; now they're just making 'em up.
Why aren't linux vendors doing this? because they don't have the bling bling?
... the people using Hotmail to spam everyone else. Like 50% of the spam that I get is from accounts like hotmail.com or yahoo.com, even on accounts for those very same domains and even with the spam filters for each of those domains on (set to "high" in Hotmail's case). Eliminating spam BEFORE it gets sent seems like perhaps a more important issue for everyone, but then again corporations doing what's best for them and not everyone isn't exactly news either (nor necessarily bad).
"Now if I could only get hotmail to stop spamming me. About once a month I get spam from hotmail under the guise of 'hotmail member services'. These junk emails have ads for all sorts of things, have little to do with the opperation of my email, and are annoying."
All things considered, ONE spam a month from Hotmail goes way way under the spam annoyance radar. (I think I get 2 or 3 of them, actually, and do not mind it). I've never minded very small amounts of spam from the e-mail provider.
Did you know, at one spam a month, it probably took you as long to type your complaint about Hotmail spam as it did for you to delete an entire year's worth of such spams? Put it into perspective.
Now, if you still don't want them, are you capable of blocking any header containing "taff" as a way around the block?
Microsoft sick of paying for bandwidth? NO! They get paid for giving out their emails. I used to use hotmail before it was bought by MS, and I never got spam. All the sudden I started receiving tons of it after the purchase. I wrote Hotmail tech support to complain, who responded by telling me they have to pay for the service somehow. That was six years ago, but I believe it still happens. Why else does their spam filters filter one porn subject line but ignore another with the same or similar strings?
There are programs out there that generate random email adresses for a given domain. There is no way Microsoft would do something so stupid. Why does everything posted about MS on Slashdot have to be some kind of conspircy?
I have always said that Once Microsoft Rules the World things will go much smoother. If anyone has a problem with anything (SPAM, Computer, Entertainment center, fridge, toilet ...) there will only be one support line!
I Can't wait!! The Possibilities are endless.
yours truly,
Gill Bates
...it's time to allow women to vote!
Seriously, while it's good they're finally doing it, why weren't they doing it years ago?
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
HAHA. that's funny. I can think of three reasons to do this:
1. The spam is costing them insane amounts of money in bandwidth
2. People stopped using MSN hotmail because of the spam, and they need more subscribers to look better compared to AOL.. because potentially Microsoft could boost it's "MSN Userbase" by including some hotmail users
3. More money. This option is unlikely, since Microsoft probably won't gain any money directly from the lawsuits, but I guarntee that more userbase + less bandwidth fees because of spam = more money in the long run for msft.
i have a hotmail account with a relatively simple name - it certainly doesn't employ any literary gymanastics. i've had this account for, oh, probably a good 6 months and i've probably received, on average, 1, maybe 2 messages from Hotmail services per month. this can be annoying if you let it, but i hardly call it *filled.* anyway my point is ...
come to think of it i really don't have one.
sorry about that ;)
"Instead they use Hotmail. Which means that M$ effectively controls all Internet email"
Huh? When there are dozens if not hundreds of alternative e-mail services that you can easily use from anywhere for free? Not even close. In fact, in the e-mail I receive, only a small percentage come from people using Hotmail.
"If they start filtering stuff out--even spam--then they are abusing their monopoly power to limit free speech"
No, it is their network. Free speech is not an issue; you are a guest on their system. Just as it does not violate "free speech" if the New York Times does not bother to print your latest letter about jet contrails.
Just keep your name out of their Member Directory and you will be spam free. I've had my Hotmail account for years spam free.
+++ David Watts 5495 0.0 0.5 1888 884
An intresting widget for a mail reader would be a "spam button". It deletes the spam, blacklists the spammer, and sends an error message to the spammer... Like the one you get when there is no address with that name.
Are there any mailreaders with thatkind of widget?
In dream society, people could be given the ability to mod replies. In real life, it would be disaster.
I don't actually get a lot of junkmail on my hotmail account. In fact, I haven't checked my hotmail account for two weeks, and I only have two pieces of mail in there:
1. Some crap from a mailing list I signed up for.
2. Spam.... from 'hotmail member services' sadly, I can't block them (I tried), but really, are "7 hot tax tips" really all that important for me to know, at least in terms of maintaining my account?
Shouldn't this kind of stuff come in as MSN-approved spam?
I can't really complain, though, cause it's free, and they only spam me once in a while.
I've had this account for a couple years now, and I use it as a junk email account whenever a website demands an email address. Still, no deluge of spam.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
..I dont think Hotmail is doing crap to stop spam. Don't tell me there is no way to block out emails from wersdfjwer@Erfsdfgdfg.sdfwer
How the funk are you going to tell me you cant tell if something doesnt even have a proper domain name..... Hotmails "spam filtering" is laughable...
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
" Oh yes, they are actually quetioning the wisdom of what Bush and the gang are doing"
That would be fine and dandy, except that none of their objections have any validity at all.
"How dare they make their opinion public"
If you don't think before you speak, you'd best keep your mouth shut.
Many of the comments have been blaming this on Microsoft itself selling addresses or stuff like this. I am not pro-Microsoft or whatever, but I think that's just nonsense.
...
Spam, I guess, hurts the company more than anybody else, it clutters the database, and waste space, and fills unused email accounts with lots of junk,
We should think a bit before blaming everything on Microsoft just because of the bad guy it is being towards us.
"What you 'seek' is what you get!"
Microsoft : "You'll have to stop using Hotmail adresse or we'll sue you!" Spammer : "I can give you 20%" Microsoft : "80%" Spammer : "40!" Microsoft : "50% and we got a deal!" *Shakes hand in agreement*
Colosse.
Most people these days don't even use their ISP email addresses, because they may change and are often hard to remember in the first place.
My local ISP is named after my town, which has six letters. I have a three character username, so it is essentially xyz@mytown.net. That is a helluva lot easier than rox0r432@hotmail.com.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
Boromir is Faramir' brother. Both are the sons of Denethor. Neither could ever be the king of Gondor, since they are the stewards, charged with taking care of the kingdom until the return of the rightful king. For Boromir to be Faramir's son would require some plot manipulations that even Peter Jackson would probably feel uncomfortable with.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Here it somes folks ... the herecy.
...)
E-mail should be paid for by the sender! Just like real mail. A new protcol needs to be designed (or maybe has been ???) to address (pun intended) this problem.
Right now the reciever covers all the costs of filtering, blocking, and dealing with the god awful Relay and Domain Blacklists (if you've ever been on one, good luck getting off
As soon as the sender has to pay you'll see spam practically drop off the map except for "legitimate" product offers and announcements.
the 'slide
"Corporate rock still sucks. What are you gonna do about it?"
Hotmail's filters have always been poor compared to Yahoo's (insert obligatory anti-ms joke here.) But I have to say, that if Microsoft is going to start aggressively suing spammers who send email to Hotmail accounts, it's going to make their Hotmail service a whole lot more desirable. Microsoft has been desperately trying to get people to pay money for their Hotmail accounts (which, back in the DotCom boom, once promised "free email for life."), and I think suing spammers might be their best possible strategy. Not only does will it reduce Microsoft's storage and bandwidth costs, it will differentiate Hotmail from the slew of freemail providers, and make the service much more worth paying for.
Until we get aggressive federal anti-spam legislation, this new strategy from Microsoft will be great for Hotmail users and good for the Internet in general. If the lawsuits actually frighten spammers away from Hotmail, I might indeed finally pay for my Hotmail account, which I now use only as one of those disposable junkmail accounts for registering on sites I don't trust.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
The poster just had to throw the slant into the end of the article. Does one twitch uncontrollably if they don't at /.?
for some reason eberyone thinks your info has to be sold for the spammers to get it. thats discusting incorrect! there are ways for them to get into the databases of emails, you'd probably be surprised.
all i see are 1's and 0's
Why is it,if I block doubleclick.net cookies,I can't visit The Register's website?
Putting aside my general "I hate MS" opinion for a second here, this is good news. The folks at Hotmail is doing us all a favour by sueing spammers. Remember, that albeit we're all swamped with spam, there aren't that many spammers out there. Recent studies (based on equal amount of facts and handwaving) shows that less than 200 spammers account for 95% of all the spam we receive. Thusly, if MS could sue the bejezus out of some of them, it would help all of us. /Christian
A dictionary attack helps them determine which combinations are genuienly not valid, thus putting more uumph behind the guesses. They want to know when they are wasting effort...not if. In this case, a miss is as good as a hit.
And in other news, sendmail honeypots are more entertaining than ever.
Is is possible for spammers to obtain email ID's from the URL obtained from a banner ad's "referal" data? Or perhaps they can harvest emails ID's if you click on a banner ad. Isn't there some sort of HTML mechanisms to do this?... I don't know, thats why I'm asking.
What about if they serve flash animations? Can flash code be made to spit back the complete refering URL?
Hotmail could start by blocking UUNet address space. Given the huge number of spammers there, this would be worthwhile, even though it would affect quite a number of people. If they did this, and monitored UUNet's performance with regard to when all the spammers (and there are a lot of them) in UUNet's space get disconnected, it really could force UUNet to once and for all stop supporting spammers.
What would Hotmail get out of it? Based on how much my mail servers get pounded on by spammers on UUNet space, I'd guess that Hotmail servers are getting hit to the tune of at least 10 million and possibly 100 million times a day. And even if Hotmail just blocked the spammer addresses, that would still amount to an economic burden of maybe several dozen servers just to handle those hits.
SPEWS blocks a large amount of UUNet space because of UUNet's continued support of spammers. Lots of innocent legitimate businesses are suffering because of this, but it's better than UUNet customers suffer rather than the recipient mail server operators. UUNet is too clueless to deal with the spammers, and SPEWS is apparently has too small a user base to have an effect on UUNet. But if Hotmail did this, UUNet would be forced to finally, once and for all, disconnect the spammers. This would be good for everyone (and even for spammers who might realize they need to stop spamming and become productive members of society, instead of being thieves).
Having a big name like Hotmail do some things like this could really help turn the tide against spamming (defined as unsolicited bulk email), and restore public confidence in email as a working medium of commerce, and enable legitimate forms of permission based email marketing.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's too easy for spammers to use a free HotMail account (like "bigscam89734@hotmail.com") to send SPAM from. Microsoft should fix that first.
I've written a server based SPAM filter that uses the RBL and mail from hotmail addresses are always rejected since it appears they are on the RBL. This makes it difficult for legit people using Hotmail to send mail to places using the RBL for filtering.
A class action suit is filed against microsoft for bugs in IIS, Outlook and IE.
Sending tonnes of virus spam and cloging up networks.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Ohters in this thread suggest dictionary-style spam campaigns aimed at high-profile domains, which is a good explanation.
However, I wonder if this isn't the beginning of an attempt to corner the market on (euphamism mode on) "permissioned, targeted email marketing" to hotmail users.
Step 1: chase away spammers who don't buy protection from MS
Step 2: sell access to spammers (high quality lists, demographics, etc)
Step 3: $$$$$
It's got to frost MS a little that there are all those "consumers" at hotmail and somebody else is sending them marketing info that MS doesn't get a big slice of.
From all these replies, you'd think you guys didn't like Microsoft or something...
Yes, you can harvest addresses from your referrer log if people come from Hotmail to your site. At least, you could: I haven't checked if Hotmail's URLs still include the email address or some munged version of it.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Actually, there is a solution, at least on my end. I created a hotmail account just so I could talk to someone on the Microsoft IM client, so I know I should receive ZERO messages on that account. I just set filtering to only accept mail from people in my address book, and then have zero entries in my address book.
It doesn't stop all the Spam that Microsoft itself sends me, but it keeps most of the rest of the spam away.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
"...monopoly putting powers to good use."
and yet not so much. imagine how much they could "save" by not having to broker all the crap the spammers are sending to their systems. less hardware costs, less bandwidth, less headaches. less spam for hotmail users is really only a by product of their business goal to save money. if they could make money from spam - then hotmail users would get a lot more of it!
business is the worst of people.
If you don't like having Microsoft send you advertising, which really is something you have agreed to in exchange for the email services (these are not free to operate, and this is how they get the revenue to pay for the services, just like commercials on TV) ... then set up your own mail server. Set up an IMAP service on it, and top that off with SquirrelMail, and you have your own web based mail that can also be used via IMAP. You can then sell it to your friends (or give it away to your really good friends). Or you can give it away to anyone in exchange for your right to advertise to them.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This could be an M$ publicity stunt, but so what? I hope M$ will perform a relentless pursuit in prosecuting these bottom feeders
I am a Hotmail user. I have been since 1997.
I'm also a Yahoo Mail user. I have been since 2000.
Last fall I decided that I either had to subscribe to a third free mail service (I hid the address I pay for, thank you very much) or try to work with the filtering tools. Both accounts were flooding with spam to the point of tediousness.
First Step: I spent a week unsubscribing out of every spam that came into my inbox at both accounts.
Expected Result: I expected the spam to increase. I was proving that not only was the address valid, but it was read.
Actual Result: Spam did decrease. Some of the spammers actually are good for their word. Others are not.
Second Step: Identify who is spamming me despite my requests. Block them, and filter them with the tools at both websites.
Expected Result: I expected to be able to stop some of the spam, but not much. They are crafty bastards after all.
Actual Result: A good portion of them dropped off.
Short Term Prognosis: After two weeks of work (Step One and Two) the volume of spam at both accounts fell about 66%. Roughly. Unscientifically. Hotmail went from 100 daily spams to 30. Yahoo went from 30 to 10. Give or take.
Mid Term Results: After a month of time passing, I encountered a spike in spam. On both accounts. My addresses had been sold.
Mid Term Actions: I repeated steps One and Two. After a short bit of work, both accounts settled back down.
Long Term Results: It's been about 6 months. I still get spam, at a much reduced rate. I dedicate one day out of every month to opt out of spam mails in my inbox. I dedicate another day to working my filters and blocks (when I say "day" I mean about an hour of work on a single day).
I get less spam. It's not all gone, but I get less. Both Hotmail and Yahoo send me "user updates". About once monthly. Sometimes I read them. Sometimes I delete them. I am not overly concerned about it. One letter per month is not something to quit a free service over. Unless I want to grandstand with my important indignation.
The point of all of this, and how it relates to the actual discussion:
If you aren't paying for the service, you get what you pay for. I don't pay for either, and it costs me about 4 hours each month to keep each one useful. Fair trade.
If Microsoft is going to endeavor to get rid of unwanted spam from outsiders. I applaud them. It might not impress the anti-MS crowd, but I'm ok with that. I don't pay for the service, and they are trying to do something to make it better. In a fashion that costs them money. With a method that no other free email service is attempting.
I'm sure it will somehow go all wrong and I will be forced to wear my MSYou! Implant Chip05 at the end of it all, but that's the price of working with the Evil Empire. So long as I get less spam with my Soilent Green, I can live with it.
Grimwell - old, cranky, mean, obsessive
What kind of loser are you? Have you ever looked in your average RFC? Even if I had it printed out and left in the bathroom, I'd read one of those only after I'd exhausted my supply of shampoo bottles.
- When someone (or something) sends you an email, it gets stuffed into a "pending" folder rather than your inbox.
- Whoever sent you the email gets an automated reply from hushmail that requires them to click on a picture of a keyhole that's placed randomly on the screen in a java app, or something to that effect.
- After clicking on the keyhole once, they'll automatically get past your spam filter from then on. You can also set up lists of addresses or domains that bypass the filter all together.
This system basically assumes that there's a human on the other end of that email to click through the filter. I haven't seen a single spam in my inbox since I enabled it.It's not impossible to defeat, but for the moment, it works great.
J
What about spammers who USE M$ Hotmail as their "base of operations"? Why doesn't M$ require Hotmail users to provide a credit card or bank account? They could use a cross-referenced database to make sure there is only ONE account per person (or at least one per credit card/bank account).
This solution will ultimately lead to spammers' shying away from Hotmail and looking for other less-recognized freeMail providers.
$DEITY bless $NATION
Apparently Microsoft hates spammers as much as the rest of us. Now if they'd only hate the other scourge of the Internet as much as the rest of us do...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I would add:
:)
4) Increased usage of Passport. I would imagine that a significant number of people first encounter Passport through their Hotmail account. If Hotmail users are drifting away because of spam, this would affect the general acceptance of Passport.
This ties directly into point 3, of course.
While I do not support a war against Iraq without a second U.N Resolution, the French are assholes. Always have been, always will be. Ce lá vie.
My hotmail account is awash in spam, I have never used the account. Simply amazing.
I really think we are going about the spam issue the WRONG way, however. Hear me out.
We are hellbent on shooting (drawing/quartering) the messengers. The messengers are ever-changing, fraudulent, pieces of crap that forge everything from the originating IP to the recipients address. But all Spam has one thing in common. Content.
All spam is trying to get you to buy some product or service.
The only reason spammers do what they do is because it's MAD profitable. Why? Because the content's originator makes it that way.
I propose we turn this massive gun we call "public outcry" towards the TRUE originators of all the spam: The people who construct the content, or pay the spammers.
If spamming becomes unprofitable, it will stop. Spammers aren't doing it to be malicious, they are monetarily motivated! Stop the source of the money, and stop the spammer.
Order one of those mini-hovercraft RC things, find out who it ships from, then sic your lawyers on them. Buy that Viagra from an online pharmaceutical, find out where it ships from, then set the coordinates on your lawyer-launcher. Go after AT&T, Discover, Home lending companies.
Your email address, once harvested, is like the freakin village bicycle! It gets passed around so much, you have no CLUE as to who grabbed it orginally, nor does it matter since so many other spammers have it! It's a vicious circle, and I say go after the TRUE SOURCE!
Does this make sense to anyone else, or should I drink some more coffee and calm down?
- OrbNobz
If I had a nickel for every spam I received, I'd...be...getting...paid, thus part of the problem! Ack!
Hotmail has so many members that if you're a spammer, creating any combination of letters/numbers prefixed to "@hotmail.com" is sure to get you some one. AOL is pretty much the same way.
But think about it! It will kill spam diversity... you wont receive any more nigerian scam or nude girl with cows... now only MSN publicity! ;-)
Let's fight for the right to SPAM! and let's bring yet another antitrust trial against M$
</sarcasm>
Just by pure coincidence I submitted a posting about 2 hours before this, asking if anyone had done a comparative study of e-mail providers and Spam.
I created a Hotmail account specifically for product registrations. It's NEVER been used in newsgroups (or to send out an e-mail for that matter), yet within hours it stared receiveing junk mail.
I've not had that problem with my main e-mail provider
Does this mean that
a) Hotmail is a prime target for people generating "random" names for spamming
b) Hotmail / Microsoft have weak security
c) MS are selling or leaking addresses so that they can publicly clean up later and gain credit
d) I'm just unlucky
Personally I favour Napoleon's dictum that we should not attribute to malic that which can adequately be explained by incompetence (in other words, favour the cock-up theory over the conspiracy)
This is not about protecting the end user from harassment. This is about "creating value" for a Microsoft "product". That product is the user's time and attention.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I doubt this is a good start by MS, and I'm not sure MS is completely helpless or innocent either.
.end attachment
: : : :
I suspect this is a PR stunt to plead helpnessness in a matter where they are actually the guilty party.
I get frequent spam on my hotmail account, I'm using this account for 4 years now. Curious thing is, these spam mails for elongated pelvic protusions, anlarged mammiary glands and Nigerian style mails - APPEAR - to be spam.
But APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEPTIVE. I'm pasting a complete mail I got recently from a bogus address, to my hotmail account, sundaram_kr@hotmail.com I post this address publicly - so I can study the spam problem in detail.
My reasoning first, then the attachment:
1. This mail APPEARS to be spam, but is NOT. The instinctive reaction of any 'SENSIBLE' receiver of spam is to hit the delete button. I did not. I sent a 'reply' and it bounced off the non-existent sender's address.
2. I checked the mail for any snail-mail address - surprisingly, there was NONE WHATSOEVER!!
Thus, I conclude:(Elementary, my dear Watson)
1. If the 'sender' were indeed a Nigerian bank spammer, he'd have included his snail mail address.
2. If he's paying for the bandwidth to send the mails to MS Hotmail, he'd better have a sound motive. Annoying me does not serve any purpose for a banker, however moronic.
3.Even if he'd planted the mail in insecure servers and used their bandwidth to spread his spam, he'd still need a motive - none appears to exist.
4. It should be trivial for a co. like MS to track down such a bulk e-mailer - years ago. Apparently hey have not done so - and thus:
5. MS 'IS' THE SPAMMER. They are the ONLY ones who'd gain a cent by annoying me, and charging me for a spam-free service. They are the only ones who could store these messages on their servers and not need to pay any bandwidth charges.
and now, the so-called spam:
begin attachment
Mr.Isaiah K.Muttai.
Senior Manager,
Operations
Banking Services,
Kenya commercial Bank.
Dear Sir,
I Isaiah K.Muttai the Senior Manager, Operations
Banking Services, I want to include you in this God's given opportunity.
On Saturday 30th January 2000, flight KQ 431 left Nairobi at 12.00 p.m. headed
for Lagos, Nigeria on a scheduled flight. The thirteen-year old Airbus had on
board a total of 179 passengers who included 11 crew members.
This plane could not land at Lagos due to poor weather and the pilot decided to
stop and refuel in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. However, on leaving Abidjan, about
two to three kilometres from the coast,the plane crashed in the ocean. This is
the first time a crash involving a Kenya airways plane since it was established
in 1977.
So my friend, one of our customers happened to be involved in the plane crash,
who deposited £11.3m.(eleveen million, three hundred thousands pounds) few
months before the incedent.
This fund has been dormant in his account with this Bank without any claim of
the fund in our custody either from his family or relation before our discovery
to this development.
Although personally,I keep this information secret within myself and partners to
enable the whole plans and idea be profitable and successful.
Meanwhile all the whole arrangement to put claim over this fund as the bonafide
next of kin to the deceased, get the required approval and transfer this money
to a foreign account has been put in place
and directives and needed information will be relayed to you as soon as you
indicate your interest and willingness to assist us and also benefit your self
to this great business opportunity.
In fact I could have done this deal alone but because of my position in this
country as a civil servant,we are not allowed to operate a foreign account and
would eventually raise an eye brow on my side during the time of transfer
because I work in this bank.
This is the actual reason why it will require a second party or fellow who will
forward claims as the next of kin with affidavit of trust of oath to the Bank
and also present a foreign account where he
will need the money to be re-transferred into on his request as it may be after
due verification and larification by the correspondent branch of the bank,where
the whole money will be remitted from to
your own designation bank account.
I will not fail to inform you that this transaction is 100% risk free. The
sharing rate of this money will be discussed later upon your favourable response
showing your zealous determination to assist
us but the first priority is your total acceptance and commitment to assist.
Please,you have been adviced to keep top secret as we are still in service and
intend to retire from service after we conclude this deal with you. I will be
monitoring the whole situation here in this bank
until you confirm the money in your account and ask me to come down to your
country for subsequent sharing of the fund according to percentages.
Please my friend, i will like to hear from you whether you are interested or
not.
Best Regard,
Mr Isaiah K Muttai.
The 'header' with the bogus details...
From
"Isaiah Muttai"
To
isaiahkm@myself.com
Subject
Thanks for understanding
Date
Tue, 05 Nov 2002 07:50:37 -0500
end header..
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The Wayback Machine (aka Archive.org, The Internet Archive) has, with little fanfare, removed entire domains from its archive in accordance with a request from Scientology's lawyers:
Lawyers for the Church of Scientology contacted the Internet Archive, asserted ownership of materials visible through the Wayback Machine, and those materials have been removed from the Wayback Machine. [email to LawMeme]
The problem is not that the Internet Archive received such a request from the Church of Scientology's lawyers, or even complied with the legal portions of the request, but that the Internet Archive has not taken minimal steps to defend free inquiry and access to information. LawMeme reveals the sordid details...
This current attack by Scientology on freedom of expression appears very similar to what happened to Google back in March 2002, initially reported among other places in Microcontent News (Church v. Google: How the Church of Scientology is forcing Google to censor its critics). The New York Times (reg. req.) has a good summary of the entire controversy on Google vs. Scientology (Google Runs Into Copyright Dispute).
Im sure its more to reduce network traffic and server resorurces, ratner then protecting its users ( us ).
But its still a good thing, and I hope they can make a dent in the 'spam-trade'. its way out of hand and only getting worse.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've had a spare hotmail account for nearly a year now, and I've gotten no spam in it at all, unless you count the MS stuff. I've even used it, giving out the address to people I know and to sites I trust (like slashdot.org and skotos.net), and to small community sites like forums and such.
No spam. At all.
If I had to guess, I would say that the 15-character username throws off some spammers. Mine's actually a combination of two words, though you won't find one in most dictionaries.
From what I've heard (hearsay), they do sell the email addresses of the people you email. This allows them to harvest email addresses from outgoing mail for sale to spammers while complying with the privacy statement that they won't sell your email adr to spammers. I strongly suspect they're not alone in this practice.
When all else fails, run.
MS spam is going unnoticed due to all the "illegitemate" spam (not that it's illegitimate to *it's* source).
Illegal spam is BS, like it's somehow different from paid for advertising. I think it's kinda nice that some MS scam is side by side in my inbox with cell phone antenna boosters. Two products that claim to do something...
It's like those guys in redmond have a lot in common with thieves everywhere.
I run trillian, I needed an MSN Messager account to contact 1 friend who does not run AIM, Yahoo, or ICQ which I already run on that beasty. So I signed up for a hotmail account as Trillian pushed me to it.
I did not write the hotmail account name down, I did not post it anywhere, I never wrote a message to anyone from it, and I never typed the words that the account name contains. In other words, nobody short of me and a secure connection should have ever seen the account name.
Within 2 days I had MSN sponsored spam, within 5 days I had my first real world spam. As of today I now have all these MSN member services announcements, and MSN will not let me block their valuable announcements (today was how to manage my money by using MSN)
blah.
Hotmail sells to authorized retailers who then turn around and sell to other places and next thing you know you're signed up for herbal viagra spam.
I doubt this is a good start by MS, and I'm not sure MS is completely helpless or innocent either.
.end attachment
: : : :
I suspect this is a PR stunt to plead helpnessness in a matter where they are actually the guilty party.
I get frequent spam on my hotmail account, I'm using this account for 4 years now. Curious thing is, these spam mails for elongated pelvic protusions, anlarged mammiary glands and Nigerian style mails - APPEAR - to be spam.
But APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEPTIVE. I'm pasting a complete mail I got recently from a bogus address, to my hotmail account, sundaram_kr@hotmail.com I post this address publicly - so I can study the spam problem in detail.
My reasoning first, then the attachment:
1. This mail APPEARS to be spam, but is NOT. The instinctive reaction of any 'SENSIBLE' receiver of spam is to hit the delete button. I did not. I sent a 'reply' and it bounced off the non-existent sender's address.
2. I checked the mail for any snail-mail address - surprisingly, there was NONE WHATSOEVER!!
Thus, I conclude:(Elementary, my dear Watson)
1. If the 'sender' were indeed a Nigerian bank spammer, he'd have included his snail mail address.
2. If he's paying for the bandwidth to send the mails to MS Hotmail, he'd better have a sound motive. Annoying me does not serve any purpose for a banker, however moronic.
3.Even if he'd planted the mail in insecure servers and used their bandwidth to spread his spam, he'd still need a motive - none appears to exist.
4. It should be trivial for a co. like MS to track down such a bulk e-mailer - years ago. Apparently hey have not done so - and thus:
5. MS 'IS' THE SPAMMER. They are the ONLY ones who'd gain a cent by annoying me, and charging me for a spam-free service. They are the only ones who could store these messages on their servers and not need to pay any bandwidth charges.
and now, the so-called spam:
begin attachment
Mr.Isaiah K.Muttai.
Senior Manager,
Operations
Banking Services,
Kenya commercial Bank.
Dear Sir,
I Isaiah K.Muttai the Senior Manager, Operations
Banking Services, I want to include you in this God's given opportunity.
On Saturday 30th January 2000, flight KQ 431 left Nairobi at 12.00 p.m. headed
for Lagos, Nigeria on a scheduled flight. The thirteen-year old Airbus had on
board a total of 179 passengers who included 11 crew members.
This plane could not land at Lagos due to poor weather and the pilot decided to
stop and refuel in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. However, on leaving Abidjan, about
two to three kilometres from the coast,the plane crashed in the ocean. This is
the first time a crash involving a Kenya airways plane since it was established
in 1977.
So my friend, one of our customers happened to be involved in the plane crash,
who deposited £11.3m.(eleveen million, three hundred thousands pounds) few
months before the incedent.
This fund has been dormant in his account with this Bank without any claim of
the fund in our custody either from his family or relation before our discovery
to this development.
Although personally,I keep this information secret within myself and partners to
enable the whole plans and idea be profitable and successful.
Meanwhile all the whole arrangement to put claim over this fund as the bonafide
next of kin to the deceased, get the required approval and transfer this money
to a foreign account has been put in place
and directives and needed information will be relayed to you as soon as you
indicate your interest and willingness to assist us and also benefit your self
to this great business opportunity.
In fact I could have done this deal alone but because of my position in this
country as a civil servant,we are not allowed to operate a foreign account and
would eventually raise an eye brow on my side during the time of transfer
because I work in this bank.
This is the actual reason why it will require a second party or fellow who will
forward claims as the next of kin with affidavit of trust of oath to the Bank
and also present a foreign account where he
will need the money to be re-transferred into on his request as it may be after
due verification and larification by the correspondent branch of the bank,where
the whole money will be remitted from to
your own designation bank account.
I will not fail to inform you that this transaction is 100% risk free. The
sharing rate of this money will be discussed later upon your favourable response
showing your zealous determination to assist
us but the first priority is your total acceptance and commitment to assist.
Please,you have been adviced to keep top secret as we are still in service and
intend to retire from service after we conclude this deal with you. I will be
monitoring the whole situation here in this bank
until you confirm the money in your account and ask me to come down to your
country for subsequent sharing of the fund according to percentages.
Please my friend, i will like to hear from you whether you are interested or
not.
Best Regard,
Mr Isaiah K Muttai.
The 'header' with the bogus details...
From
"Isaiah Muttai"
To
isaiahkm@myself.com
Subject
Thanks for understanding
Date
Tue, 05 Nov 2002 07:50:37 -0500
end header..
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
i get ~200 spams a week in my hotmail account its good to see that not everything m$ does is evil
lose != loose
For the number of people who enjoy bashing microsoft on this website, a large number of you hold hotmail accounts.
This is not meant to be flamebait (I access my hotmail account through mozilla), but rather to point out that while many of you hate microsoft, you like the products they produce. Even if you're cursing MS Word while using it, you're using it instead of OpenOffice (or any number of alternatives), giving credibility to MS that they produce the best products.
If you have to make a funny statement that MS Sucks AND did a good thing, or whatever, try to be less of a hypocrite about it.
P.S. I'm not new here, I'm also a hypocrite, that's my angle in about all my posts (sarcastic jerk), but when everyone else treads that ground cluelessly, it gets old fast.
"Why would MS sell your e-mail address so they can turn around and pay for the bandwith it takes to receive thousands of spam e-mails?"
The OBVIOUS solution to this would be that MS DOES NOT pay for the bandwidth. How is that possible?? The only possibility is that: MS IS THE SPAMMER. I'd even imagine they store only a SINGLE copy of a 'type' of spam - and then link it to all their own users.
Similar to the way in Exchange - a mail to a 'group' is stored once, and refernced from there. Thus - no need to pay bandwidth for millions of spam; and 2: no need to STORE the millions of spam either.
Most Moderators are Morons; Sensible Moderators are Oxymorons.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The original news.com.com story is slightly more informative.
.com.
It's also slightly more
Is this the first time an MS story made it to Slashdot without a conspiracy about how they're evil in some way? Next, are we going to get a story about how Linux needs improvements here and there?
Cleaning undersea stables would indeed be a Herculean task, but I think you meant "Augean".
MailWasher for Windows does exactly that. You begin compiling a "friends" and "foes" list that help sort incoming mail. You can toggle whether to use blackhole lists to automatically mark mail as spam or probable spam. Then you can delete and/or bounce messages in bulk. It's simply delightful.
I thought the headline meant they were going to crack down on all the spammers who *use* Hotmail (or at least claim to). I can't recall ever receiving a legitimate message from a Hotmail account, but I have piles of porn offers, Viagra-by-mail, etc. with Hotmail return addresses. One of these days I may go ahead and add that procmail recipe: :0 /dev/null
* ^From:.*@hotmail
Microsoft gathers the email addresses of anyone who *sends to* a hotmail account, and distributes them. It has been documented, and proven. This is just a PR move to pull that from the spotlight, because people are figuring it out now. Don't buy into the hype - if MS can find a loophole to profit from you, THEY WILL.
MS sells addresses to spammers. MS observes spammers getting to spam their service for free by harvesting or dictionary-attacking hotmail. MS is not making money off of this.
Solution: Sue the spammers who are spamming for free! If you want to spam our users, you have to pay us!
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
. . . I would promise to NOT sell or share my customers email addresses. And hew to it.
But, I could harvest all email addresses that they (customers) send-to and all email addresses that send to them. And the "CC"s. That ISP would have a big pile of live addresses to sell.
Jeez though. That does seem pretty rotten. Maybe I would only sell them to advertisers that "promise" to get OPT-in type permission before using.
The subject was "Fight spam with MSN 8!" Think about it for a moment.
Please elaborate.
Distributes addresses to whom? FOr what purpose?
Whoever sent you the email gets an automated reply from hushmail
So, this scheme will work as long as the sender isn't also using a similar scheme. Further, this strategy implicitly says that your time is more valueable than the sender's time; which is somewhat arrogant.
I use my hotmail account to harvest spam for use with Mozilla's Bayesian filters. Without Hotmail, my spam folder wouldn't have over 1000 messages in it right now (and I just started a few months ago, when mozilla 1.3a came out)
I never use Hotmail anymore, mainly because I can't be bothered to check the 'delete' box for 200 spam messages every time I log in. It's not a cure for spam by any means, but it would make it much easier to clean out an Inbox. Yahoo mail has had this feature for ages, and it makes web based email much more useful.
With my hotmail mailfilter... The only junkmail I get in my hotmail is from Microsoft itself!
If the domain from the email server does not match the given IP address of the given server BLOCK IT.
forgetaboutit.
This is rediculous. Microsoft is looking for a cut. How much would you like to bet they settle for a % of future earnings.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
"West] Germany has behaved itself since WW2, and that's what the US is complaining about!"
Not really. Remember Willie Brandt, with his "realpolitik" approval of Soviet imperialism. Remember when West Germany supported Libya in its efforts to exterminate Jewish people when it funded its chemical warfare program. Accounts keep leaking out of West Germany's support for anti-semitic Middle Eastern regimes.
"Nah, you just fund them (IRA*, Osama bin Laden, Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Contras) and train them (as before minus IRA). *=privately."
The U.S. never funded Bin Laden and the Taliban. These two groups were not on the scene when the U.S. helped Afghanistan nationalists kick out the Soviets. Saddam Hussein? Primarily a creation of France and the USSR, with little U.S. involvement. The Contras? More revisionist history. It was a great thing that the U.S. helped them and kept the dream of Nicaraguan self-determination alive in the dark years of Soviet domination.
So, they're going after people spamming TO hotmail, but not people spamming FROM hotmail?
If you actually read the grandparent, you'd see that the email address is fake and that there is no return mailer. Either this is one dumb spammer who is being purely annoying, or there's something underhanded here.
As far as MS paying bandwidth charges... if it's locally-hosted spam, they don't pay on it. Fire up the spam daemon and bombard the email service internally. Why? Perhaps just to generate more clicks, I would guess.
I'm sort of disappointed the parent didn't give the extended headers; I know that hotmail would show the mail server routing... in such a case they could block the spammer if he/she was doing it directly from the home machine, or if not, to contact someone down on the anon-mail host to shut the crap off. In any case, there's a simple solution (and yes, you can tell in access logs who has been sending a ton of spam at once from the same IP, it's not that hard). Now, if these really are the headers as completely as given.... then what's left to think but perhaps they might have a hand in it? I seriously hope you weren't convinced of your statement that "email does not contain the IP address the stuff was sent from". Even a spoofed or bogus IP would show up on a robust service monitor's detection when a crapflood of spam comes in.
This could all just be MS/Big Brother FUD and this is just an isolated case of an uberignorant spammer who goofed up his mail, but I'd be interested to see what's up. I don't think MS is as innocent as they portend, given how easy it is to set up access control by IP to services. Yes, good on MS for going after spammers... but after how long that Hotmail has been spam-riddled? It reeks of opportunism to me.
Never attribute to Hanlon that which can be adequately attributed to Heinlein.
Microsoft will just offer spammers a subscription service implemented in .Net to e-mail Hotmail users for them ;-)
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Of course MS sells hotmail addy's to spammers. So why are they suing themselves (or rather, their customers)? To create the illusion of being your anti-spam friend. Free good press. Yay now MS is on the good side! Hardly. This will be the last you ever hear of this "suing the spammers" case. MS wins both ways. They make money selling the hotmail addresses, and they look good "suing" the spammers.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Can the slashdot effect make spam expensive?
If we posted any URL from a spam message, minus any identifying information, to slashdot and enough people visit that url will the spammer lose money paying for that bandwidth? What if several broadband slashdotters run a recursive wget several hundred times simultaneously? Can we make spam a less viable matketing technique if the bandwidth costs alone are more than snail mail and any of the idiots that actually buy stuff from spammers can't even connect to the site in question?
I Don't Work Here
Besides selling drugs to kiddies, this guy has also used spam to make his multi-million$ fortune
e t.net.au/
David William Miller
res:
81 Attfield St. Fremantle
Western Australia
ph. (61)(08)93351607
ph. (61)(08)93358709
mobile: 0414956410
bus:
4/10 Rees St O'Connor
Western Australia
ph. (61)(08)93141062
http://www.amusementauction.iin
http://www.kingcarnival.com
email: dmiller@iinet.net.au, gra@iinet.net.au, gra102@hotmail.com
I wonder if part of the answer will be to split up hotmail into a bunch of smaller domains, each containing no more than 10,000 users just to make dictionary attacks much less productive. I would love to see that and have each domain contain a honeypot. The honeypot would be the spam filter. Anything sent to any users and the honeypot would deleted. Of course stuff in the honeypots would generate the usual abuse follow-ups.
The truth shall set you free!
bcentral isn't exactly clean y'know...
word.
While we obviously aren't anywhere in the ball park of MSFT financially, we do offer similar service (email). These big companies making beneficial use of the hordes of idle lawyers they likely have is to be commended, even by competitors.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
wasnt it Microsoft themselves that switch on every singles users "share my personal information" without telling them? Didnt this act pretty much start most of those users getting all the spam?
Speaking of Monopoly, I can't believe there isn't a version of Monopoly centered around the man Microsoft.
Who wouldn't want to play a game that has locations such as 'Internet Explorer Place', or 'OfficeWalk'.
Laugh!
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Thank you for pointing out MS bought out Hotmail. It brightened my day in a dark way.
Think about how many people receive emails with links inside them... and click them and get a frameset with the top from MSN saying "You are visiting a site outside of hotmail...." yadda yadda.... good way to capture your email addresses and all. Anyways, everyone I know who has a hotmail account has had a ton of spam.. one guy I know stopped using it because of that. I personally like Yahoo! Mail... more space and less spam... though I still get some there as well, but you will always see some amount of spam.
Rob
-----
Got something on your mind?
Post it.. we want to hear it!
www.bboombotz.com
I beleive Yahoo is selling "descreetly and indirectly" to spam companies. You have to watch when you sign up or pay for Yahoo services how you are agreeing to sign your information over.
I was forced to get a Premium Yahoo account because of the "bulk mail" filling up every 48 hours - If I didn't empty it, it would bounce my eMail.
Yahoo uses this questionable way of gaining revenue in the same way they allow OBVIOUS porn solicitors to post personal ads, and allow OBVIOUS scammers to sell "Presale Auctions"
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Why doesn't mail.yahoo.com have this problem? I have hotmail and yahoo accounts just like several of my friends do and our yahoo accounts don't see 1/10 of the spam that our hotmail accounts do. I don't even bother reading my hotmail anymore because every account I have there gets literally hundreds of junk e-mails per week. It's such a waste really.... but maybe this is just code-bloat karma coming back to bite Microsoft :P
It is an old concept, as old as mail itself. So instead of paying lawyers, to sue people who could be outside the US, why not invest in a new technology.
There are many out there.. To mention one (plug coming..) check out the proposal I submitted to IETF. http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-fakih-am dp-00.txt
it is simple, and it works..
Adonis
It would even be nicer to see the unwanted spam I get from Microsoft to stop. I don't even have a hotmail account, but I get plenty of spam from M$ in another of my accounts. And I'm not talking about all of the spam that uses hotmail return addresses and the like, I'm talking about spam that I never signed up for that claims to come from Microsoft and is outright selling a Microsoft product. Unless you belive in a conspiracy theory that someone else is going to a lot of trouble to forge these things to make poor old Bill Gates look even more evil, then Microsoft is also a spammer.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I think it depends a lot on what your username is. A possibility that you didn't mention is that the account you created has a username that was previously owned by someone else. (Microsoft did a sweep of old, unused hotmail addresses some time ago.) If this is the case, it's probable that it's been being spammed for the entire time that it's been inactive.
Also random username guessing is fairly normal for hotmail. If you have a relatively short name then it's almost certain it'll be on a spam list. I have two particular hotmail accounts -- one with an 18 character user name and another with a 37 character username (that's four words joined by underscores), and neither of them have ever attracted any spam. A year ago I created an account with a 5 character username that wasn't even a dictionary word, and it was being spammed within a month.
If you want to avoid spam on hotmail, you need to do more than keep your address secret and make sure that you uncheck or check all of the appropriate boxes on signing up. You also have to have a long enough username to make it infeasible for spammers to randomly guess it.
I hope that Microsoft nails them. They also own and operate some other web sites: www.sixfigureincome.com and www.carsonsi.com. These bastards mail millions of people a day and are getting rich doing it, essentially selling their primarily email marketing services and get-rich-quick schemes. Nasty bastards.
But ... isn't that what your Hotmail account is for? To give to companies you know are going to SPAM you. I log on to my Hotmail once a week to delete 200 SPAMs. I don't use this account for any real pursose, only as an address to give when e-mail is required to download software, etc.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
What about all the spam mail everybody gets for Hotmail subscribers! that is where 80% of my spam comes from.
if it will get those fsking spammers off my back.ç
I swear to god ill be the first to applaud them.
NO SIG
I still don't use the hotmail account I got five years ago, because there is no way to stop advertising emails from "staff". They can't be filtered, and have no reply buttons. MS, as usual, are hypocrites about their criminal activity.
Just set up Outlook Express to connect to it in typical client/server fashion. Granted, it's in beta (and has been for quite some time... dare I say, indefinitely?), so it has some issues. But it's definitely helpful in avoiding banner ads altogether...............
As a test about 4 months ago I created a Hotmail account, and never gave the address to ANYONE. I didn't so much as log into the account, except once to activate it. I unchecked all of the subscription services when joining up, and didn't check the box that said MS could sell the address name. 2 months later I logged into it, and it was full of spam. How'd that happen?! The only one besides me that knew the address existed was MS... Hmm...
YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT!
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Not only M$ does that. I get up to 20 spams a day from iol.it and libero.it - their pornographic announcements that luckily mail.app filters.
But - back to hotmail and M$ - I don't believe the rumor before I see it. I use hotmail only for registering use and throw web services, or for the things I think I can get spammed from. And - I filter my mails. If the incoming mail contains hotmail and is NOT in my address book > trash.
>>Unless I want to grandstand with my important indignation.
;)
>Ummm, you're in the right place for that.
Technically, in matters concerning us versus Microsoft it is not so much important indignation as impotent rage.
"My God, this must be a truly remarkable corn chip, to be so widely and confidently touted."
These dictionary attacks are pretty commonplace actually, and people run them against *much* smaller domains than hotmail.com... I have logs of 15000+ connects attempting delivery to domains I host with all the attempted usernames in alphabetical order... adm@mydomain, admin@mydomain, adel@mydomain etc etc...
If I see that level of aggressive mail farming on my wee domains, imagine what kind of resources spammers would put into hotmail farming... I bet people would have no trouble dedicating a couple weeks of heavy-duty computing time to build a dictionary to farm hotmail with with literally millions and millions of combinations of names, or even just random characters... aaaaaaaaaa, aaaaaaaaab...
I bet the rewards would be worthwhile for them to put that sort of effort in.
Well, it's more like 99999 more other guys blame Microsoft whether they deserve it or not.
I don't like Microsoft, I rather dislike them, but then, we have to be fair when judging them, if we keep on blaming Microsoft for stuff they don't deserve the blame for, they can, and would, use this against us in things they do deserve the blame for, it breaks our crediblity!
"What you 'seek' is what you get!"
The submitter refers to Microsoft as "America's favorite monopoly" ... but of course, America's favorite monopoly is the Government.
... didn't we?)
(It is our favorite, right? I mean, we voted for it
-kgj
First Microsoft eliminated all of their security problems last February, and now they're cleaning up Hotmail!
Wonders never cease! Microsoft is on a roll!
Give me a break.
Redmond, WA (AP) - Just when you thought Microsoft couldn't be any more consumer-friendly, the company which produces Windows, the de-facto standard in desktop computing, manages to surprise everyone by announcing the inclusion of RedHat with every copy of WindowsXP sold.
Steve Ballmer, President and Chief Executive Officer for Microsoft Corporation, spoke to reporters this afternoon in a press conference at Microsoft's headquarters located in Redmond, Washington. Ballmer enthusiastically addressed the crowd, stating, "[N]ow, slashdotters can have the best of both worlds, all in one box, all at one price!"
Ballmer then went on to dance around, screaming, "Yeah!" at the top of his lungs, clearly attempting to create a stir with those in attendance.
CowboyNeil could not be reached for comment.
There was also a recent case where false-positives ("ham") became a problem for Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram newsletter -- certain versions of SpamAssassin thought it was spam because it was long and contained URLs.
The whole thing is an arms race, and I don't see any signs that the spammers are losing the race. They apparently test their spams against all the filtering software they can find out about. For instance, they'll write vi*gra instead of viagra to keep from being filtered.
The real solution is economic: we need a whole new e-mail protocol with a sender-risks-paying system.
Find free books.
If you go back to the original post that you were responding to, you would find that the author was not talking about receiving spam, but rather to a spammer forging the headers to use the victim's his email address in the Reply-to: header. This results in hundreds or possibly thousands of replies and bounces hitting the victim's email inbox. This is a case Identity Theft, and in my mind should be punishable by removing certain tender parts of their anatomy...
Your Servant, B. Baggins