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 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
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!"
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?
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
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?
Easy, to force people to return often to said free email account to delete spam on the very small capacity accounts, thus seeing more ad banners in the process...
AND
To frustrate serious users into shelling out money to purchase an account with a higher capacity
You don't become a monopoly by thinking linearly!
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.
Heh... You've obviously never been on the receiving end of this little trick. You'd quickly change your pretty little tune after receiving several thousand hate-mail messages, and had your ISP account cancelled because you were "generating illegal spam and violating the User Agreement," and then got blacklisted from other ISP's because you were a known spammer, and had people hacking into your computer to get back at you and... well, need I go on?
> if i send the same messages via snail mail is it illegal abuse of your home address?
Ummm.... that's called Mail Fraud, and carries heavy fines, and jail time if you do it enough.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
- 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
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!
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)