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Microsoft Files 15 Lawsuits Against Spammers
Popsikle writes "A Seattle Paper reports that 'Microsoft Corp. announced it has filed 15 lawsuits against alleged e-mail spammers in Washington state and the United Kingdom on Tuesday.' It states the tough anti-spam laws in UK and Washington allows ISP's to sue spammers. This could be a good test of the new anti-spam laws." There's coverage on CNN as well. Microsoft has picked a good venue for such a case.
If Microsoft is able to successfully stop the spammers will your views towards them change? Power in the computing industry is not always deleterious to its constituents.
Ok, I read this and the little Mr. Cynical on my shoulder says, this is all just PR. Yes, they are filing lawsuits, etc...but in the grand scheme of things, this is just advertising.
Microsoft: "We're on your side"
Microsoft: "We hate spammers too!"
Microsoft: "We're fighting for the little guy"
etc, etc, etc.
The cost of a few million (drops in their bucket) of court costs might go a long way in falsly convincing some people that Microsoft actually cares about the little guy.
Just a though.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
Please M$ add Network Solutions in your list to sue. Those frickin bastards tell users their whois database is not to be used for commercial spam, and yet they turn around and do the same anyways.
eTrade SUCKS
My oldest account on Hotmail (about4 or 5 years old) is plagued with SPAM. I keep it because people still use it to send me MSN conversations.
While Microsoft is suing the spammers, they're not doing much to block them. Are they? Some bayesian filters and RBLing with a bit of context analysis (50K people get the same email in 2 minutes) might just prevent them the agony of having to sue people.
For the Microsoft haters out there:
Microsoft files 15 lawsuits against spammers to preserve HD space on Hotmail servers, and to make a bit of money
For the Microsoft lovers out there:
Microsoft files 15 lawsuits against spammers to prevent their customers from receiving unwanted mail
" I like the Washington law better, the one that Microsoft is suing under."
Why? 'Cos the ISP (Internet Spam provider) gets to sue on your behalf (the user) and reap profits? Is spam is so inevitable and untracable, why not allow users to profit from it; if at all they succeed in tracking the source.
There's more to this than meets the eye, surely.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Yes, it's all supposedly "opt-in," but the bcentral spams I have received tell me otherwise.
sulli
RTFJ.
Why are Microsoft seemingly seeking to stop spam, when there own hotmail service is the most spam prone email service I have ever used. I get about 10 spams into my inbox everyday, (and another 30 into my junk mail folder), even though I have fairly high "so called" spam protection enabled!
Compare that to my yahoo account, in which I have never ever recieved any spam in the 12months that I've been using it...
surely Microsoft are doing something wrong somewhere? How is it that Yahoo can make it so that I recieve ZERO spam, and Hotmail can't?
(also why do I have bad karma?)
Bullcrap.
Just look at K-Mart for a great example of this -- I have yet to get them to remove one of my forwarding aliases from their stupid system.
Why? Some idiot manager bought a cd of 5 million emails to add to their "Bluelight CRAP" email book. One, of course, was the harvested alias of mine.
So, I called them. Told them in no uncertain terms to take that off.
"But sir, why don't you just send the unsubscribe from that email account?"
It's a fucking forwarding alias. I CANNOT SEND MAIL FROM IT. Therefore I never opted in. But K-Mart won't unsubscribe without an email specifically from that address.
We went back and forth on this for about 15 minutes. I asked for the manager of their phone bank for the email division and got him. He denied ever doing something like that. Then he told me straight-out that only by sending an email to them could I have gotten subscribed in the first place so obviously I had opted in and could opt out the same way.
He's obviously a fucking liar and DID buy a scavenged email CD from someone, or else they did a web harvest themselves.
Don't kid yourselves. You can't trust the unsubscribe from a so-called "legitimate" business any more than you can the one from the spammers.
The above link also states that more than half of U.S. currency is in circulation *outside* of the U.S., so there's less than $330 billion in circulation within our country. Amazing isn't it? No, that doesn't mean that Bill Gates has 20% of the nation's wealth. It just demonstrates how money is created by the banking system. There are those that misunderstand this process (or don't believe it, amazingly enough!) and state that for someone to become rich someone else has to become poor. Thanks to the banking system this is NOT necessarily the case and also explains why a $10 trillion economy can work with only $330 billion in currency.
(a) everyone hates spam
.
(b) MS has the legal resources to really have a go at the spammers (and at the least make sure they get a lot of publicity about it)
Even if they lose, MS will be able to file their legal expenditures under "usefully spent money" in terms of the good publicity they'll buy re: the average joe on the street (and if they win they'll get the PR for free since they'll be recouping $$). All of a sudden they'd no longer be a corporation whose executives were repeatedly caught out prevaricating during their last trial, but instead a corp taking action to help everybody...
Yes, today I really hate Microsoft. They have reached out and screwed me, though I don't run their software and have nothing to do with them. It's personal now.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What stops Microsoft from appending some legal agreement in an EULA that specifies that their software can not be used by any individuals for the purpose of proliferating spam email. Define spam. Define a harsh penalty per email sent. Then try to enforce it.
.5 seconds, which was inadequate to read the entire document, that he did not know how the scroll bars worked and thought what showed in the window was the complete agreement, that he purchased the computer with the software already installed and he never clicked "I agree" at any point, etc., etc., etc.
Microsoft does not want to risk the courts ruling that EULAs are not legal, binding contracts. If Microsoft were to take that case to court, the spammer could challenge the legality of the EULA, showing that it was not signed, that there was no evidence that he read read or understood it, that the click-through agreement allowed him to click on "I accept" without even forcing him to scroll to the end of the document, that he clicked it in
There is a reason that the BSA and software companies take pirates to court for copyright violation rather than for violating the terms of the legally questionable EULAs.
I have to say that I for one am glad to have Microsoft doing "the right thing" for once.
Even if they are evil in their other doings, let's at least recognize that in the war on Spam, it is going to take a few gorillas to clean up the mess. I'm hoping that Yahoo, Earthlink, RR, etc. bring some lawsuits right away for spamming their customers.
Let's get the spammers out in the open!
Even if they don't win the lawsuits, these seem like some pretty shady businesses, and with two or three big companies challenging them in court, it wouldn't take long for them to go bankrupt.
Die, spammer, die!
Best read in good ol' Monaco 9 point.
That's not entirely true. Some spammers will send out fake spam, often as a means of retaliation against various anti-spam advocates. For example, here is one such case.
If it becomes standard practice to sue the advertisers in spam, spammers will just include more random, innocent third-parties in their spamming runs. The result will be enough doubt over guilt that it'd be impossible to figure out who was really responsible.
I think it depends on the law. In this case, Washington's anti-SPAM law is an extension of their Consumer Protection law. Defrauding or misleading consumers isn't "protected speech" by any interpretation of the Constitution that I've heard, so I doubt this law will be overthrown on those grounds.
Besides, this law was upheld by Washington State's Supreme court. "Free Speech" wasn't even an issue in the case. A quick Google search for "Washington State supreme court upholds anti-spam law" should turn up plenty of links.
Have fun,
Nathan 'Nato' Uno
http://web.unos.net/
I've got one that's worse. Some dipshit used my email address for a "buffy the vampire slayer" notification from Amazon.com. This obnoxios spam periodically sends out an email whenever anything new "buffy" related arives at amazon. After trying to login with the "forgot password" stuff which couldn't find the account, I tried for the next 6 months to get the morons at Amazon to remove my email address from their system. It still comes. So I put a 5XX level reject on the SMTP server so that anything from amazon gets rejected. 3 years later, amazon STILL tries to connect to my server, and Still gets rejected. It seems the idiot admins at amazon NEVER EVER remove bad email address from their system.
So besides the "one click patent" reason to avoid amazon, this is another good reason. I have never bought anything from amazon, and never will.