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Microsoft and the SPAM Game
The Seattle Times reported a while ago that Microsoft is pushing for Washington State Senate Bill 5734 which will overturn most of Washington State's laws that specify monetary penalties for companies who send out spam. This will completely exempt ISPs from current Washington spam laws, which Microsoft just happens to be. It seems that they are jumping the gun a bit. They are having a company named Digital Impact (save that address for you spam filters) send the email for them. Thankfully I live in Seattle so maybe I can collect an easy $500 before Microsoft guts the current law.
Thankfully I live in Seattle so maybe I can collect an easy $500 before Microsoft guts the current law.
I also live in Washington state, and I can tell you from experience: collecting the $500 will not be easy. Here are the ideal conditions for a lawsuit (taken from the Peacefire webpage, which I have been a member of for four years now):
* The defendant is a corporation, and you know the state where they are incorporated. (Usually, the state where they're incorporated is either the state where they're located, or Delaware -- because Delaware makes it easy to incorporate there.) Legally, a company cannot use "Corporation" or "Inc." or "Incorporated" anywhere, unless they really are a corporation -- but that won't tell you where they're incorporated, or even if they're incorporated in the U.S. Unfortunately, with most spam, you can't even find out the name of the company that sent it, much less whether they're a corporation.
* You can easily prove one of the following (one of these conditions must be satisfied to show that the spam violated the law):
* The sender address ("From:") or return address ("Reply-To:") was forged. If you get mail from an address that looks blatantly forged, like "98of292h38h2r@hotmail.com", send a blank message to that address, and keep the error message that comes back to you saying that there is no such address. This can be used to prove, in court, that the spammer violated Washington's anti-spam law by forging the return address. The subject line was "misleading". This is a subjective determination, one that will ultimately be made by the judge. One of the spammers that I'm suing, sent me an advertisement with the subject line "Shareholder request", which I considered blatantly misleading since Peacefire doesn't even have "shareholders". (The gist of the advertisement was, "You will look good in your shareholder's eyes if you use our product.")
You have registered your address with the WAISP (http://registry.waisp.org/) registry -- to sue a spammer under Washington's law, you have to be able to show that there was some way for the spammer to determine that you lived in Washington.
More power to you if you can collect the $500, but it's a tough road ahead.
I came up with the ultimate solution for spam: spam.thatgeek.com.
Every time I get a piece of spam, I put the email address of the spammer on this website. Then, when the spammers' email-collecting programs hit my page, the spammers' addresses get into their own databases!
The hunters become the hunted! If others would do the same, no one would ever dare spam a geek ever again.
Well, there is a monthly "features" mail that i get on my hotmail account from "staff@hotmail.com" that
cannot be blocked
cannot be marked as "junk mail"
cannot be forwarded ( say to "abuse" at hotmail.com)
does not specify how i can stop recieving it
i think its the worst kind of spam possible. no other spam msg has made me feel so helpless and so angry. The fact is only hotmail itself could spam its users in this manner...they have a system where the "this is junk mail", "block sender" buttons etc, do not even appear when u view the msg. The first time i rcvd it was when i finally decided to get my own domain and buy some decent email hosting. I have still not completed the switching over, but am getting there...i definitely wont miss hotmail. its weird when one of the largest companies in the world finds it useful to spam its users.
Ghoul2
Sigura Non Grata
Why don't they just obey the law if they want to send spam? Spam isn't illegal in WA, just forging the header or providing a misleading title. If they'd send mail on the up-and-up, there's no problem.
Taken from the WA lawbook, it's illegal when it:
(a) Uses a third party's internet domain name without permission of the third party, or otherwise misrepresents or obscures any information in identifying the point of origin or the transmission path of a commercial electronic mail message; or
(b) Contains false or misleading information in the subject line.
And my thinking microsoft is something which I dislike; being a corportion known for its poor software and monopolistic practices; is something which is totally following the crowd? I express my dislike for their practices; regardless of insight. It doesn't take a genius to say microsoft is shit; no sir. And I'd have to say its fairly obvious that microsoft is not someone you would wish to compliment for just making it easier for people to spam. I don't quote rhetoric; I'm too lazy to care what other people think; I develop my own opinions and express them as I see fit. You're probably a fairly pretenious person, from the seeming of your posts; anyone who agrees with the majority must be a sheep and following the crowd.
Actually, you can block those e-mail by going into Options, Custom Filter, and creating a rule that states, "Deliver mail that contains staff@hotmail.com in the from addr to my Junk Mail folder."
Works for me.
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The current law can be found here. A report on a successfully prosecuted case can be found here. If one reads either, it's easy to see that the current law only applies to fraudulent headers.
Given that the current law only covers fraudulent headers, I doubt that Microsoft is maliciously trying to destroy the current law.
However, last year the senate introduced bill 6568 which extended the old law to require that commercial e-mail contain ADV: as the first 4 characters of the subject line. That bill passed the senate with flying colors. Unfortunately, it got locked up in committee in the house and died.
House bill 5734 is a watered down version of last year's senate bill 6568.
I don't like Microsoft much. That said, the story at the Seattle Times is riddled with half-truths and inaccuracies. For example, it claims that 5734 completely exempts ISPs. The senate summary of the bill says
So, ISPs aren't liable for transporting SPAM, as they aren't liable for transporting copyrighted material or child porn. They can still be liable for originating, or aiding in the origination, of spam. I think that's a reasonable exemption.I'd be really interested in knowing whether lobbyists that are partially funded by Microsoft also supported senate bill 6568 from last year. If so, this is definitely unjustified Microsoft bashing. However, if their lobbyists locked it up in the house then we can villify them for weakening a good bill.
Too bad the article doesn't comment on that, and I don't have a way to find out.
I used to be a narrator for bad mimes. (wright)
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
You are either trolling or - with a track record of Digital Impact / m0.net spams going back over four years long documented in news.admin.net-abuse.email, you are full of shit.
If I don't subscribe to a list, and m0.net sends me unsolicited commercial email telling me to opt out if I don't want more unsolicited commercial email from m0.net, then m0.net is a spammer.
> Everything they send out has clear and effective unsubscribe methods.
>
> There is a valid purpose for email marketing, calling any mass email from a company Spam is ridiculous, if they have a method for opting out and/or unsubscribing.
If you are neither trolling nor accept that the record demonstrates that you are full of shit, there's one more option: you're shilling for m0.net, the DMA, or some other interest that stands to benefit by redefining spam as "that which you don't do". Please - and I mean this in the kindest possible way - go fuck yourself.
Don't jump on digital impact too hard. I work for a MAJOR e-commerce site that contracts with Digital Impact. They are very good at sending out large volumes of e-mail reliably. We use them purely for legitimate, non-spam-type e-mails. Sure with time we could write the code to do it ourselves but they specialize in it. I'm not sure what MS has contracted them to do but as much as I hate to say it, it could be on the up and up. Not all high volume e-mails are spam.
As for overturning spam laws I'm skeptical that it is in the public's best interest but Digital Impact does offer valuable services.
Even as recently as last month, MSIE came in 6 out of 6 in a comparison of web browsers. Opera and Mozilla, among others, have it beat by a long shot in all categories (well, Opera costs, but I get my boss to pay). It's even documented in U.S. Federal Court records that MSIE acheived market share over Netscape by bundling MSIE with new copies of MS-Windows.
Quattro, Lotus 1-2-3 and other spread sheets were faster and more mature. It wasn't until MS-Excel v4 when Microsoft's alternativs started to come up to near the same grade as competitors.
Likewise with small desktop databases. Foxpro, dBase, FileMaker, Reflex, and others were still a length ahead of MS-Access. After all Microsoft is still playing catchup, though they did manage to buy out Foxpro. Oracle9i and IBM's DB2 by far offer the best performance and functionality for high end SQL servers. Postgresql and MySQL have the mid-range covered and would be what Microsoft's SQL server is trying hardest to compete with. The Microsoft SQL server is not up to snuff nor is it secure.
But almost-as-good won't displaced established tools. That's where leveraging and sales pitches comes in.
Early versions MS-Word were a unique exception among Microsoft's products in that they were actually competitive with contemporary products. However, whether MS-Word variants were actually better than WordPerfect, AMI and others is probably more an issue of taste than something objective. It and MS-Windows were used to shoehorn MS-Excel into sites.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Hate to burst your bubble, but it was probably just a dictionary attack done by spammers on MSN's email servers. The same thing happens on Hotmail.com, Yahoo etc. Your address was only 8 characters long, so it would be inside the range of characters spammers try : the send spam to *every* combination of letters and numbers up to a certain length.
:)
In future, if you wish to avoid things like this, use a longer username. Or don't use a free email service.
I got lots of suggestions for you:
Get your LEC to set up ANI on your dialups.... ANI can not be blocked. It is like callerID on steriods.
If you can't get ANI, require all new signups to dial into an 800 number for their first logon to activate their account. You get ANI with the callers phone number when they call an 800 number and they can't block it.
Require a voice contact number for new signups, and require a photocopy of the phone bill showing service address and account name for that number.
Or even simpler - require them to "activate" their account by calling IVR 800 number from their home phone, just like the credit cards do. You get ANI with full phone number and subscriber name, and you can block calls from payphones or from out of the local area.
When you catch a repeat offender, let him dial up and then immediately drop.... do this until he calls for tech support. Rope him in, and then offer to send a tech to his house with a free new modem in order to troubleshoot it. Get him to tell you how long he has been at that address and had that number.... tell him it may be an inside wiring problem (water in the jacket of the phone cable, corrosion, ground fault... make something believable up).
Once he admits that he has had that number and that address for the time period when the previous spam was sent from there, launch tactical strike of your choice.