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.
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?
Besides they have banner ads to serve you to make $$$
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.
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?
Well that's a weird case to be honest, because I have been using different kinds of account names to see which ones recieve less spam, and I have noticed that some kinds of names actually recieve more spam then others, most noteably first alphabet emails. I have recieved emails sent to names very simillar to mine (in the To list) in a brute force manner. Maybe you forgot to uncheck the addition to white pages or something? Because it is there by default, and if you have it checked then reasons of spam are obvious.
"What you 'seek' is what you get!"
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.
"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.
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?"
All fine and good, as long as the reply-to address isn't forged.
Case in point: About 3 weeks ago my email was flooded with bounce-backs from spam. Apparently someone had used my email address in a forged From and Reply-To header. I recieved about 300 of these messages in 5 hours.
In your scenario, suddenly my email address is blacklisted, not the spammers. Oh well, guess it's time for a new Hotamil address anyway. (BTW, I do have another Hotamil address, that has never recived a non-"Hotmail member services" spam. I think the trick was to put nonstandard characters in there, that particular address has an _ character in it).
Think For Yourself. Question Authority.
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
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.
Cleaning undersea stables would indeed be a Herculean task, but I think you meant "Augean".
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.
I know it is spam in principle, but Hotmail "staff" sends out an average of one email per month per user. Hardly enough to choke their servers or your account. As well, mail from "Hotmail Staff" is most likely just a pointer to a central file, reducing diskspace and bandwidth as well since savvy users delete the pointer (?) without loading the actual message. I personally don't find those messages all that hypocritical since they are advertising their own services. After all, why look the gift horse in the mouth? It's FREE as in beer.
As well, the reason spam is illegal is because it is unsolicited by the email provider or user. Although not solicited by the user, *who* owns the darn servers? Microsoft shouldn't be barred from sending internal messages. I'll bet the messages don't even take up allocated account space (back to that pointer issue again).