Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Steps Up Anti-Spam Efforts
An anonymous reader writes "Bill Gates announces new focus at Microsoft to abolish spam. Read the announcement titled Toward a Spam-Free Future."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
they can stop sending me spam asking me to pay to increase the size of my inbox because of excess spam.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
I must remind everyone, the majority of people who orginally saw this got it from an email.
Mike
I happen to like the refined flavor of potted meat
Slashdot, the site where everything's made up and the points don't matter
His editorial on the same subject in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Microsoft has already done their part to reduce spam...if you can't get your OS to function, how can you get spammed?
I just have to chuckle, I wonder what really goes through his head (Bill Gates) when he gets Spam e-mails to help him "Get out of debt NOW!!!" Heh...
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Like almost everyone, I receive a lot of spam every day, much of it offering to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It's ridiculous.
Bill Gates
I think Bill just won the understatement of the year award.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All, just remember that the definition of spam is fluid. One person's spam is another's direct marketing.
I don't think Microsoft will eb getting away from direct email marketing to those with whom they have an "established business relationship", but I think they will be working to put in place a process for dealing with UCE - unsolicited commercial email to use the FTC's term. Frankly, if you are using their free email service, I think you should be willing t receive their mailers (TANSTAFL.
Are you sure it was ONLY your inbox they were asking you to increase?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Microsoft is taking legal measures because spammers cost them time and money with their Hotmail and MSN ventures. Microsoft would still consume your entire living toddler given the chance.
Could microsoft perhaps change their focus to "not changing focus" every 2 months? A few months ago, it was all about a new focus on service centric software development ... then, it was all about a new focus on security, and so on. Kinda reminds me of the "top priority" syndrome, where if every item in your to-do list is "top priority", the result is that none of it really is.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Self-regulation needs to be supported by strong federal legislation that empowers consumers without threatening the vitality of legitimate e-commerce. Our proposal is to create a regulatory "safe harbor" status for senders who comply with guidelines. The guidelines would be subject to approval by the Federal Trade Commission. Compliance would be confirmed by a self-regulatory body. Senders who do not comply would have to insert an "ADV:" label, for advertisement, in the subject line of all unsolicited commercial e-mail.
Lemme guess, once its approved by the FTC the software will be available for purchase from your spam-hating friends at Microsoft!
I personally dont hate spam enough to subscribe to a national service. And what about non-American email? Would be automatically filtered as and ADV?
Nice try, Mr. Gates.
It looks like our spam problems are almost over. I mean, look at what happened when Microsoft decided to "focus on" getting rid of security holes in their products...
:(.
Oh yeah
Game... blouses.
How about adding pop-up blocking to IE? That would show a real commitment to "eliminating spam".
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
The thousands of twits running open-relay Exchange servers to fix their machines?
Exactly how does Microsoft profit from eliminating spam? Unless of course you are planning to introduce a whole new mail system protocol based upon the Palladium security model...
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
U.S. Government:
1. War on Communism - ongoing
2. War on Drugs - ongoing
3. War on Poverty - ongoing
4. War on Terrorism - ongoing
Microsoft:
1. War on Crappy Security - ongoing
2. War on Linux - ongoing
3. War on Spam - ongoing
# of wars completed: 0
Newsflash:
In an effort to curb spam, Microsoft shut down it's web-based email service.
"75% of this planet's spam originates on our servers" Bill Gates was quoted as saying today. "By abolishing Hotmail, and moving to a commercial email solution, our users will be able to reduce their spam intake."
The leaders of the "free" world were skeptical as to the veracity of Gates' comments.
"Another free throw-away service is going down the toilet," said John Q. Public, the CEO of ILIKEFREESTUFF.COM. "Hotmail was the last way for people to assert themselves anonymously and freely on the internet. Granted that most of the assertions that people made were spam, but it's still an assertion."
Gates was not available for comment on his comments.
By any chance have you read the fifteen volume license agreement you signed up when you created your MSN/Hotmail account?
Ayup
In other news, Skynet went on-line on Monday, June 30th, 2003 and becomes self aware at 2:14 a.m. June 31st, 2003....
Windows has obviously been trying for the last couple years to control every electronic medium it can get its hands on. And, everything it touches, turns to proprietary. And with the number of MS machines out there, and with the direction the government is running (allowing corporations to be police, ala *AA), I am fearful that MS will be able to dominate e-mail as a whole.
I can imagine MS trying to persuade the Gov't to mandate MS technology to protect against spam. I find this laughable at first, but given how well the US gov't understands technology, i find it quite plausible.
Gates is jumping on a bandwagon, where there is already public support. It's what he needs, public support. The tide has been turning against him, with poor xbox sales, Linux becoming better and better, OpenOffice closing the gap, and losing in the server market. He's deserate to gain some public recognition, and spam is an easy target. Be wary of the Vole, for he knows exactly what he's doing.
While i am forced to use MS for academic, work and extracurricular purposes, I am on a lookout soon for a point. This point is going to to be HUGE. Where useability and ease of use come together to create a Linux and OSS Office product that competes directly with MS's systems for the everyday user, millions will flock to the cheap alternative. It's coming, and Billy knows it. And he's doing everything in his power to prevent it.
* = except their own spam and their VAR partners and other 3rd parties.
Yahoo!, AOL abolish spam and pop-ups**
** = except their own, of course.
This is another attempt of companies using reverse-issue support to get their way, to be seen as so-called do-gooders, but in reality they're making back-room deals to slip their exclusions in to rig the system in their favor. It's another day of lobbying as usual in Congress, w/ some nice "conference" vacations, comps and perks to get some ear-time. *wink-wink, nudge-nudge*
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Amusing, true..but technically, one could argue that you *are* soliciting those advertisements, simply by signing up with MSN. Regardless of whether or not you agree with the advertisements, by becoming a user of their service, you are giving your assent. Whether actively or passively, it doesn't matter; in the end, you always have the option of going elsewhere.
I'm not saying that it's fantastic that they spam you, but they aren't forcing you to use their service, either.
Where's the proof? All I see is a statement about what they want to do -- currently total vaporware. Meanwhile open source has been the source for many of the ideas in Billy boys speech (statistical filtering, for one).
cswingle Fairbanks AK
We are building on advanced work at Microsoft Research in fields such as machine learning â" the design of systems that learn from data and grow smarter over time. This kind of technology is vital to the fight against spam because every defensive action causes spammers to change their attack. Technology, to be effective, must continuously adapt, without requiring a team of people to examine messages one by one. With machine learning, a "smart" spam filter can automatically adjust to spammers' shifting tactics.
Translation: We've noticed that other people are already incorporating these features into their products (Apple's Mail.app) and that you can get good Bayesian filters pretty much free, so we guess we'll embrace and maybe extend that.
To help, we have assembled a massive and still growing database of spam, collected from volunteers among our millions of MSN and Hotmail subscribers. This database will prove invaluable later this year when we release Outlook 2003, which will include a new, smart filter that will access the database to recognize and block spam more effectively. The filter in Outlook 2003 also will be updated frequently and easily, as with Windows Update today.
Translation: Hotmail is a honeypot for spam.
Our proposal is to create a regulatory "safe harbor" status for senders who comply with guidelines.
Translation: Maybe we can create the "trusted computing" equivalemt of electronic mail.
Tweet, tweet.
Skynet, Skynet Solitaire and Skynet Minesweeper (TM) are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
Other than that, nothing particularly new or earth-shattering in this article.
I liked what he said, except for where he was touting the Hotmail spam blocking efforts.
It really doesn't matter how much spam they are blocking. If I continue to get 100+ spam a day, then their spam blocking is worthless. And I do, and it is.
Spam sucks, indeed, but a new threat looms, and that's spyware. Every non-technical person I come across has their machines crammed full of spyware crap. Machines creep along, popups appear all the time, and other strange things happen. Most users are clueless. They'll just end up buying a new machine because their "PC is too slow".
I believe Microsoft is largely to blame for this with Internet Explorer. Many users have default settings that do not prompt or reject downloads of unsigned ActiveX objects. So Gator slips right in. And they don't have prompt/reject set for running unsigned scripts.
This is one reason people need to switch to Mozilla. But I digress...
.sigs are for post^Hers.
After all of this, I'm not sure which is worse -- anti-virus companies, or anti-spam companies...
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
1983 "640K should be enough for everybody"
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
brought to you by the makers of Microsoft BOB...
10 MD
What they're doing is subtly spinning their Trusted Computing initiative as a way to tackle the spam problem. This way, they get sympathy from quarters from which they would ordinarily receive none.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
This writer is really good. A strong spam-is-a-bacteria spin/fud method is used successfully throughout the article. It raises fear and anxiety in the reader akin to that of a virus, perhaps more poignant in these times of SARS:
.]."
.]pollution of the email ecosystem."
"Unsolicited commercial email is a spreading plague that feeds[. .
"[. .
"Bringing Spammers into the Sunshine," "isolation," "epidemic."
With the aid of Microsoft I will, according to the author's true message, be eating a diet of good email, exercising, and going outdors so to speak, and thus be protecting myself (or recovering) from the disease that is killing oh so many email users.
Bravo on the style
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
The funny thing is that this is one of the oldest known management principles in the world, and yet so few STILL master it.
:-)
It was documented in "The Art of War" (Sun Tzu), worded something like "defense everywhere is defense nowhere", with the explanation that at every single time you need to focus, prioritize, and take calculated risks on what NOT to focus on. If you focus on defense everywhere, then you are not defending anywhere.
And people still haven't learned it. Makes you wonder why people write books.
Perhaps they saw my comment conveying the idea on the UK to hold public enquiry on spam story a few days ago ;)
No doubt it was really quite a common theory. I stand by what was said back there... Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express, whether or not the Slashdot or Linux community wish it, *are* for sure the most common email clients.
As one person on the thread quite rightly put it, it's normally the Microsoft users (granny, mom, joe sixpack et al) who are uninformed enough to respond to spam in the first place, making the business thrive. Helping them not to see it can only kill off the spam industry, surely. I hope so. Commonplace spam filtering "on every desktop" (as Gates would put it) can only be a good thing.
As such, I'd like to say a very rare "thanks Microsoft, good luck"
Stop selling all those hotmail addresses to spammers, that might help reduce spam!
Seriously, it's like the phone company. They sell your phone number to a zillion telemarketing lists and then they charge you to buy a box that blocks telemarketers (as if they're doing you some huge favor by offering it). They are profiting on both sides here, it's disgusting.
No. The commonly-accepted definion of spam is (1) unsolicited (2) email that is (3) either commercial or bulk in nature. (1), (2), and (3) must all be present for something to be spam.
In my observation, only spammers try to define spam to anything else.
..is the process of automatically updating...
Critical Update #S15896b: This update will prevent the software from automatically replying to many types of spam sent using the HTML format.
Critical Update #S15897: This update will prevent MS Anti-Spam from automatically deleting certain payment-due notices from certain online services, notably, AOL and your electric company.
Security Update #5498443676a: This update will prevent a malicious spammer from using javascript to turn your installation of MS Anti-Spam into an open SMTP gateway.
Please do not interrupt this automatic update process, which has been activated for your convenience and protection.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
On Microsoft master Server...
'net stop hotmail.com'
If this article confuses you, don't worry. It was posted yesterday in a much clearer fashion.
If it wasn't for spam I never would've gotten hooked up with that excellent Nigerian thing...
It's coming together now, any day now....
Kremvax
--- Little Atomo - The Amazing Thinking Robot from Atomocom! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIP9KisHi4k
microsoft could start by allowing the *option* of disabling the viewing of html email in outlook and outlook express. linked images are used by spammers to verify if an account is active and if an email is being viewed. not to mention the huge-font headlines found in your average spam message and/or images (sometimes not-so-safe for work).
but microsoft does not want to give users this option. why?
Rhetoric is find and good, but anyone can thump their chest and say they are for this or against that-the proof of their commitment is in the actions they take after the speeches and editorials of this week are curbside awaiting removal next week.
Perhaps their first step, if they are truly interested in reducing the level of spam, would be to start at the point of installation. My past experience has been that unless one went in and did a custom install, many times things were installed that were not only completely unnecessary for the average user, but unknown to those very users. And in what were often insecure default configurations. SMTP servers are not needed in every installation location, even less frequently is the need to allow relay from addresses outside of the network on which the machine resides, and proxy servers are necessary even less frequently still. Yet some past default install configurations would install services such as these, services unneeded whose removal could prove at times to be a Herculean task.
Step number two closely coincides with this: customer education. Very few people I know want to wade through a 1000+-page book or two on configuring just one piece of software on their machine, but many of the users who find themselves being contacted by their local abuse personnel have no idea the steps that led to their machine being an unwitting conduit for exploitation and relay. It seems that a little extra work to make the default configurations more secure, and to advise the less-advanced installing users in clearer terms what the potential consequences of configuration choices could be, could result in enormous payoffs in reducing the number of systems that could be used for such nefarious purposes.
It has been some time since I have spent much time working with systems based on their software, and perhaps the experiences I have had with their software (which led to my comments above) are no longer the case. I hope this is so, but do not believe it to be the case yet. I truly hope they are earnest in their claim of a desire for a spam-free future, and to this end, I hope they will truly work with the standards bodies and the community-at-large to help eradicate the problem.
Well, I am not a spammer, but I am making an observation on what I have seen in terms of folks behavior.
For example, I have seen people that have signed-up for offers from a company (I saw them do it) turn around and start complaining that they are being spammed.
For most people, spam is any email that they don't want in their mailbox at that moment in time. If it is something I don't want - even if I set up a relationship and asked for it - then it is spam.
I detest Spam. I get tons of it and hate the resources I spend on my mailserver dealing with it. It should be dealt with somehow (I think a scheme with a 1/100 of a cent charge would deal with it effectively). But the reality is that people's definition of Spam really is that email that they don't want to see cluttering their mailbox at that point in time.
So let me see if I have the major companies' spam fighting techniques down:
Earthlink -- fighting spam with challenge/response
AOL -- fighting spam with lawsuits
MSN -- fighting spam with position papers (marketing materials)
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, maybe for Mr. Gates... but I'd love to get rich quick!
-brain
I am a writer, and the only way I can get published is buy spamming every human being on earth.
Examples of my work are spams such as:
Damn you MS!!
Error 407 - No creative sig found
This leaves the future wide open for further "innovations" including:
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
my dear Billy
If you wern't so silly
and hadn't sold the list
to make money hand over fist
if you turned away from the dark side
went to unix where there is light
you would cuss a little less and be so carefree
cause with unix you can stop spam for free!!
-- everyones not everybody and neither is everybody like everyone.
A business is not designed to make friends, engender feelings of goodwill towards puppies, or cure cancer. That, my friend, would be called a charity.
Or a Community. You know, these cooperative things people lived and took part together in, which when combined together created civilizations?
Let's face it, when the American people chose to embrace the radical right agenda that is in many ways epitomized by Ayn Randianism back in the 1980s, and exchanged their status of citizens for that of consumers, and their sense of business ethics went from a "let's find a win-win approach we can both benefit from" (positive sum game) to "let's make a fast buck, whatever the consiquences to others" (zero, or more commonly, a negative sum game), we lost our communities and became little more than faceless wage slaves serving our faceless corporate masters. Most of us are lucky enough not to live in the small southern towns our corporate masters chose to dump their toxic waste in (thanks, Monsanto), and those that are unfortunate enough are generally dead and so not a concern (thanks Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Baby Bush, for gutting the EPAs ability to be at all vigilant).
It should be no surprise that when one redefines humankind's humanity as "charity" (with all the negative baggage that implies) and humankind's inhumanity to itself as "nothing personal, it's just business, and businesses exist to make money, not friends", one loses one's own humanity in the process. What is surprising is how long American culture has managed to survive and even thrive, after having dehumanized itself and its people to such an appalling degree. One can only hope that the rest of the world retains a little more wisdom, and that emigration isn't a complete impossibility.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If domain administrators could also publish the addresses of their outgoing mail servers, then the receipt of a suspected forgery could trigger a relatively simple, automated verification process. Incoming servers would then be able to confirm whether senders are who they say they are.
So, does this mean all SMTP servers would need some sort of registration or domain name?
Although it would certainly be easy from a business standpoint to demand that all e-mail be sent from clearly acknowledged mail servers (like Hotmail or Yahoo) that can be contacted to enforce anti-spam laws, I don't want my friends' Outlook 2003 to destroy all the e-mail I send just because I run my own sendmail. Surely there are other methods of fighting spam than dominating the entire e-mail infrastructure...
Unless you're Microsoft.
Sign up for a throwaway Hotmail address. Never give the address out to anyone. Never use it for registration. Just let it sit there for a month or so. Then log into it and see the mountains of spam it contains. Since you never gave this address to anyone, the only possible way the spammers got the address is because Microsoft sold it to them.
Nonsense. Ever heard of "guessing"? -- Generate likely hotmail addresses by dictionary lookup (common words, common names and common integers). That and some concatenation and a sendmail script and you're off to the races without having to buy a single address.
Recently released pedophile organizes neighborhood cleanup.
.
I think it might take a little more for Microsoft to turn its image problem around . .
-Peter
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/
and spam will disappear. It is the BEST baysinian-thingy spam-mail-proxy stuff I've ever used. I'll stop being so technical and just say TRY IT. Setup your proxy, and watch it rip. In over 400 e-mails I've had ZERO false positives (setup the "magnets" when you get started.). And for Windoze users, yes it runs great on Windoze and is EASY to setup.
So do I still hate spam? Sure. Because it's there. Because it costs money and takes resources from the web. But it is NOT a problem in my life and should not be in yours. The last thing we need is POP3 and SMTP to become "Palladium Improved". Let the world know, starting with yourself, that baysani-something-like proxy's work great.
Oh, and if you use hotmail, never log into their crappy site again, while still getting your hotmail e-mail and spam free at that! Use Popfile, a pop3 proxy from www.boolean.ca. that knows how to speak Hotmail! Now you simply have this:
Hotmail -> Popfile -> PopMail -> Inbox.
Poof! Hotmail and every other account you have, all pulled down into one application spam free (yeah, Popfile supports unlimited accounts). Sweet.
"a smart filter can learn from a user's personal preferences to create a unique, anti-spam immune system"
If it's anti-spam immune then I assume this means microsoft will be pouring only _its_ spam into your inbox?
Sure it sucks, but at least be accurate.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Instead of making your name "bob@hotmail.com" try "123512341619192351291969212@hotmail.com" and try again. Most hotmail spam is brute forced (ie: every possible comination of usernames consisting of 8 characters) or based on a dictionary attack (words combined in various forms that comprise of likely email addresses).
Since you never gave this address to anyone, the only possible way the spammers got the address is because Microsoft sold it to them.
It doesn't happen to be possible that spammers know there are a lot of hotmail users, and thus spammers use a dictionary attack to generate random usernames? No, that's silly. Much easier to blame MS which is suing spammers and trying to ease at least some of the spam problem, than it is to blame Alan Ralsky sitting in his basement sending you spam.
Now that Bill has solved the security problems in his products, he is moving on to spam. Way to go!
I recently created a new hotmail account with a name that would not be found using any dictionary search. I selected _every_ privacy option I could find. Nobody but me and hotmail knew of the new account.
Within 6 hours I started to receive spam.
Hotmail _must_ be leaking registration information from somewhere.
Sign up for a throwaway Hotmail address. Never give the address out to anyone. Never use it for registration. Just let it sit there for a month or so. Then log into it and see the mountains of spam it contains.
;-), but it's hard to believe that they would sell addresses to spammers. It's not in their interest because spammers can collect addresses quite cheaply, so the amount of money Microsoft would receive would be rather small, and when people receive too much spam, they may abandon the account and not see Microsoft's ads any more.
That's everyone's experience, I think. I used to create throwaway accounts at Hotmail, and spam came in right from beginning.
Since you never gave this address to anyone, the only possible way the spammers got the address is because Microsoft sold it to them.
Don't rush to such conclusions. May I guess who the addresses in question looked like? Probably like the ones I used to register - a letter for the first name combined with a given name or a word that can be found in any dictionary. Who knows, maybe someone else had the address previously, gave it away everywhere and let it expire - in any case, it's easy for spammers to guess such addresses. I think no one should use e-mail addresses with domains like hotmail.com or aol.com for anything else than throwaway accounts. With these domains, it is so likely that a relatively short, pronounceable address you make up or generate with a program corresponds to an actual e-mail address that dictionary attacks are very efficient and used very often. I experienced the difference with GMX - a mail provider that is probably at least as popular in central Europe as Hotmail -, I received much more spam to addresses at gmx.de than to addresses at gmx.ch (Switzerland is much smaller than Germany, the likelihood of a random address @gmx.ch existing is therefore smaller and dictionary attacks less likely).
I've just registered a Hotmail address with 30 random characters and numbers. I am quite certain that it won't receive any spam. If it does, I might be inclined to believe that Microsoft sells addresses (I'm certainly not the first person to conduct this experiment). Of course, Microsoft does a lot of evil
I haven't used Popfile, but I'm generally quite sceptical about Bayesian filtering. I tried out the Bayesian filtering system of Mozilla, it needed an awful lot of mails for training until it had somehow acceptable results, and even then, it had quite a lot of false positives. Maybe, I expect too much. I expect that an e-mail in a language the filtering system has not seen before will not be misrecognized as spam, but invariably, some of the first mails in a language not seen before were labeled as spam.
I think there is a more fundamental problem with Bayesian filtering. Of course, you can get very high percentages with them, but that doesn't mean so much. Quantitatively, most e-mails we usually receive follow certain patterns (mails from mailing lists on a certain subjects, in general mails on subjects we often deal with), and it's quite easy for Bayesian filters to learn their characteristics. However, I think, as a rule, unusual messages are more important than those that are very similar to thousands of others (rare and unexpected events have more informational value), and it's just these unusual mails that are more likely to end up as false positives. So, the nice percentages can be quite misleading.
Maybe, I'm too radical here, for people who only rely on receiving mails in few languages for which the Bayesian system soon has enough samples, their performance isn't that bad. But I strongly dislike the principle underlying Bayesian filters: "What conforms to the rest is good, what is unusual is suspicious."
An example to illustrate what I mean (it's not very realistic, of course): Person A daily receives e-mails from people of the opposite sex wanting a date. So, every new mail of that category are safe. However, A does not have a job and always waits in vain for e-mail with job offers. When finally one such mail arrives, it goes into the spam folder and is overlooked because it doesn't have the characteristics of the legitimate mails A usually receives (and has some distant similarity with work-at-home and MMF spam).
B daily receives e-mails with great job offerings and makes an unusual career. So, every new mail of that category is safe. However, B is lonely in private life and waits in vain for a date proposal. When finally one such mail arrives, it's put into the spam folder and overlooked because it doesn't have the characteristics of the legitimate mails B usually receives (and has some distant similarity with spam advertising dating sites and telephone numbers).
Both A and B have very low rates of false positives, so the Bayesian filters are working well...
I prefer systems that check for typical spam characteristics and mail source (Spamassassin, Blacklists), in my experience, they aren't less efficient than these hyped Bayesian filters, but in contrast to them, they do not promote conformity against diversity. Maybe, Bayesian criteria are useful as an add-on, but I would never want to base the decision whether something is spam solely on them. What should I do when Bayesian filtering becomes popular, thresholds are set lower and lower because of the rising spam problem and I want to write someone a message? Should I try to guess which wordings conform better to the usual correspondence of the person I write to - otherwise there's the risk that the message won't be seen?
That would already be total capitulation, spam would have defeated e-mail.
I love how Bill toots his own horn.
Like almost everyone, I receive a lot of spam every day, much of it offering to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It's ridiculous.
Hey Bill, pass me a billion and we can share the joke!