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Brightmail Denies "White List" Deal With Spammer

Posted by michael on from the as-the-spam-turns dept.

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..."

4 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That's nothing... by ma++i+ude · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I've got a deal with Microsoft and the big AV companies to not do anything about the email virus I'm about to let loose.

    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!
  2. Re:So who are these guys http://www.ileads.com by CaptBubba · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It is sweet justice. Either Newsweek or Time had an article a year or so ago about spam and anitspammers. One guy was so annoyed by a spammer that kept sending the same spam to him (the guy must not have had a filter) so he bought something from the spammer.

    The buisness that was spamming was then listed on his credit card statement. He sued them and won something like $1,000 from them for ignoring his opt-out requests. He had a statement about his technique for finding the spammer that went something like "They could hide from me, but nobody can hide from American Express"

    I wish credit card companies had fake numbers to give to these spammers and paypal fraud artists that would automatically trigger alarms when they ran through for verification. This would be a great way for people to track down who is actually profiting from the spam. A good-guy version of the trojan horse, if you will.

  3. Re:So who are these guys http://www.ileads.com by Feztaa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wish credit card companies had fake numbers to give to these spammers and paypal fraud artists that would automatically trigger alarms when they ran through for verification.

    Hey, that's a great idea! It's like that honeypot thing I read about a while ago (can't find a link, sorry).

    Anyway, I don't know anything about credit cards (not having one, and all), but I heard that for security reasons, you can have the credit card company put limits on your account, like if you work 9 to 5, have the card raise red flags if it's used between 9 and 5, since you're not likely to be using the card while you're at work and any use at that time is likely fraudulent. So just sign up for a credit card and say something like "I only use it sundays, flag everything else", and then buy into a bunch of spam stuff on monday.

    And then, just never use the card for anything but spam. I guess that's a little extreme, but if you really wanted to hunt down these spammers...

  4. Might be something to it by AngryShroom · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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