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AOL, MS & Yahoo Unite On Anti-Spam Initiative

Posted by Hemos on from the fighting-the-bad-men dept.

dilaudid writes "FT.com has an article about AOL, Yahoo and MS putting aside their differences to combat spam. An AOL VP is quoted as saying "Our customers are telling us it is the number one problem with the internet." Their intended response is "narrowly-defined federal legislation aimed at so-called "king-pin" spammers" who send the bulk of the mails. "

2 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Exceptions by Otter · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Wait, lemme guess- that "narrowly-defined" definition of "spammer" will not include internet service providers advertising their services, nor companies the ISPs have paid to spam their subscribers?

    My primary email account has disappeared under an avalanche of bounces and blocks from some asshole spammer forging my domain name in everything he sends out. I'm job hunting now, and refuse to install some new untested filters that are liable to throw out something important. So I need to wade through hundreds of returned ads for streaming gay porn.

    If these companies can put a stop to the total scumbags, they can include a provision that their ads can be sent over the NSA's secret high-speed network. I'll still be grateful to them.

    My grandmother got porno spam within 2-3 days of her MSN "internet appliance" getting set up, and it had a very unusual account name(with numbers in it, too)- no dictionary atttack hit this one.

    Maybe, but my suspicion is that you underestimate the magnitude of dictionary attacks on common domains like that. Given millions of idiots, all MSN addresses are shallow.

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    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  2. And if you lie about the headers? by unfortunateson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The spammers will claim they all fit in the personal communications requested by the recipient, and are not required to fill in all that rigamarole.

    And you're right back where you started from.

    No, the solution is to inform people that
    a) Your body parts aren't going to get bigger (bellies excluded)
    b) You really don't want to trust your finances -- even credit bailouts -- to people who'd SPAM you
    c) There are no dignitaries in Nigeria that have millions of dollars they need to launder into the US, and if they did, you'd be arrested
    d) There's no need to pay for porn. Go out into the big blue room and you could find someone real. Besides, there's enough free internet porn, just look.

    You get SPAM because it works. People buy this crap. If they didn't, the spammers would stop.

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