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Brightmail Denies "White List" Deal With Spammer
ThePretender writes "From the InfoWorld article: 'A spammer's claim to his clients that he had an agreement with anti-spam technology vendor Brightmail to not block his traffic was contradicted by Brightmail officials today.' From the sounds of it, Scott Richter (apparently a notorious spammer) might just be looking for some media attention, he even goes as far saying he has similar agreements with some major ISPs. Ouch! May the drama unfold..."
The problem is that anyone can create bogus emails, thereby masking their own identity. Well surely there is a technical solution to this, such as abandoning the current mail protocols to prevent people from submitting emails with fake identifying info, or from submitting emails from bogus IPs. But where is there any progress along these lines?
Tell me, does this involve Microsoft's decision not to issue any patches for a month?
You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!
I have written several times of a major spamming operation that is using major ISPs. This is the guy who has been paying MSN > 1Million / month (apparently, also, Yahoo and AOL, but I do not know what the amount or deal is there). MSN then was getting greedy and raised it to > 5Million. From what I understand several of the other spammers kept the deal, but this guy approached another major DSL company and offered 2Million / month. The interesting thing is that he wants IPs and bandwidth. The major companies do not try to shut down insecure servers becuase they locate them and then simply use those IPs. Later they can blame the client.
Most of the spam that everybody thinks is coming from overseas is not. It is here, but the large ISPs are willing to hide it for a large price.
*'A spammer's claim to his clients...*
I think that's the key phrase here. Apparently Scott is losing customers, and in order to retain them, or gain new ones, he has to tell clients he is "whitelisted". What reputable business would want to pay an email broadcast company, when that company is blocklisted. He couldn't possibly think to use this as a defence, saying that if Brightmail whitelists him, he must not be a spammer. But then again, from what I've seen regarding him, I wouldn't be surprised.
As far as I'm concerned, any business that uses Optin is just as sleazy as Scott.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
I was told by a friend of mine (mortgage broker) that his company stopped using ileads.com because they were getting too many "bad quality" leads.
It seems that some people are starting to fill out these forms and having the brokers contact them and then after taking all the contact information from the broker, they inform them that if they don't a) divulge the information of where they got the lead and b) agree to stop using companies that use SPAM to generate leads that they will hand their contact details to the foaming at the mouth public.
Is this legal ? Souds like sweet justice to me.
Not only do some anti-spam software companies make deals with spammers (according to the article), but some also are among the worst spammers.
I talked to a few different anti-spam software companies over the last few months. With each of them, I told them that once we made the decision on which (if any) software to go with, I wanted absolutely no further phone calls or emails trying to sell me their product. We made our decision just over 3 weeks ago and informed the software venders.
Two weeks ago, I received a spam from one of the venders we didn't purchase from. (Yes, the software we decided on caught it, but still, it's the priniciple of the thing.) I followed their procedures to opt-out and also sent an email to the salesperson whose name and email address appeared in the email. I informed her that I told them that I wanted no emails from them trying to sell me their software. I explained how disappointed I was in them and asked to receive no further emails.
A few days later, I received another spam from them. This one was "signed" by a VP of the company. Again, I opted out and sent an email to the VP explaining the entire situation. I explained that I was beyond disappointed and was now getting angry. I demanded that I not receive another sales email from them and explained that if I did, I would be passing the word about their tactics to friends that might be in the market for such software.
Guess what? I got another one. This time, I called the salesperson I was dealing with and explained that I was going to tell everyone I know about how Intellireach is an anti-spam software company that spammed me, did not honor my request to not get spammed in the first place and also did not honor several opt-out requests when the requests followed the instructions in the spam.
But why is the rum gone?
My company is far too small to contract directly with Brightmail so we setup an account with a Brightmail service reseller recommended by Brightmail. The very day we switched our MX record over to them the amount of spam we received actually skyrocketed. I even tested this theory by sending a piece of mail to a brand new mailbox with a GUID as the address through a telnet session directly to the service mailserver. Within an hour that mailbox started to receive spam!
They deny the possibility and called me a liar. We no longer use that service.
There is always the possibility that one of their employees is not so honest and the company has no knowledge of this activity but something is amiss.
"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion." - Arthur C. Clarke