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Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits

Posted by timothy on from the woodshed-time dept.

ackthpt writes "Wired is carrying news that Microsoft, America Online, Earthlink and Yahoo are filing suits against spammers under the CANSPAM act. They will 'follow the money' to find the perpetrators and shut them down. Suits currently filed against John Does will have actual names attached once subpoenas get the names of the actual persons. I wish them all the luck, as I clean about 500 pieces of drek a day from my mailboxes." Other readers point to coverage from the BBC and from the Associated Press (here's the AP story as carried by the Boston Globe).

10 of 382 comments (clear)

  1. Good for them by Space+cowboy · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is really excellent news - according to Spamhaus.org, 7 of the top 10 (including the top 2) spammers worldwide are from the USA. Looking at the list of the top 200, I'd say about 80% are from the USA. It needs action within the USA to stop this, and for once I can say I really approve of something AOL, MS and Yahoo are doing [don't know much about Earthlink] - See, I'm not biased at all :-))

    Today I received 1681 emails, 137 of which are non-spam. Now I have good anti-spam filters, and I probably only opened about 300 of those, but that's still a major pain where it hurts. String 'em up, I say, bring back lynching - mob justice for spammers!

    Simon

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!
    1. Re:Good for them by silas_moeckel · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm getting a similar volume of email with significantly less spam getting through running spamassasin at 4 with no false positives or whitelisting. What spam filter are you using it dosent sound like good spam filters to me.

      --
      No sir I dont like it.
    2. Re:Good for them by TwistedSquare · · Score: 3, Informative
      according to Spamhaus.org, 7 of the top 10 (including the top 2) spammers worldwide are from the USA

      Unfortunately from that list 7 of the top 10 spammers alphabetically are from the US, though I don't dispute that the general trend is the majority being from the US

    3. Re:Good for them by CaptBubba · · Score: 3, Informative
      Look at the bottom of the page where they keep the stats. All but 2 on the list for Febuary are in the US.

      I get spam from the #10 guy, but unfortunatly he's recently sold my address so now I get spam from some guy in Lativa as well. While the volume hasn't gone up, the content has changed from being viagra sales to being ads for beastiality. Plus the new spams seem to be harder to filter, loaded with many false html tags trying to get them through. Only 4 emails a day or so make it past the mail filters my ISP uses, but I still don't want that shit in my indox.

  2. Dispose() by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Use Mailinator and avoid the spam in the first place!

  3. Spamdemic map by prostoalex · · Score: 4, Informative

    Several years ago this spamdemic map was quite popular. It's an attempt to have a poster that would allow you to figure out who's behind all those "get out of debt" messages in your inbox. Some of that is still relevant nowadays.

  4. Re:Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits by Kenja · · Score: 4, Informative
    "Since when has Microsoft been an ISP?"

    Since they started the Microsfot Network? MSN started as an AOL style dial up service back around '93-'96.

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
  5. Spam is just getting rediculous! by AcquaCow · · Score: 5, Informative

    As one of my responsibilities I admin and camp the spam filter at work. We get a few thousand emails a day into a company of 80.

    Much of this spam has had to resort to making their emails unintelligible to try and bypass spam filters.

    Others like Aphroditie Marketing have atleast 2 class C licences with full dns for each address that they send email out from. I've had to firewall off entire class C's to block their emails!

    C'Mon...who is going to read email with a subject line like:
    "Order Meds V@1|um - XA:n:az ; V|@grA & %RND_MED_VIC+0DIN $ .Soma. $ Pnte:r:min LV0J2" anyways?

    At some point of obfuscation it has to just become a giant waste of time to try and send the email out.

    --

    up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
    *makes note to limit user processes...
  6. Better link to AP article by Patik · · Score: 4, Informative
    Click here.

    MyWay.com carries all AP and Reuters articles with no banners, popups, or any kind of registration. Just a couple inobtrusive Google-provided text ads at the bottom. They also have reg-free referal links to NY Times, USA Today, CBS, FOX, and MSNBC stories.

  7. Re:Excellent News! by netfall · · Score: 3, Informative

    I should point out the article I reference with that 7%... Written by Deborah Fallows, Senior Research Fellow at Pew Internet & American Life project. "SPAM: How it is Hurting Email and Degrading Life on the Internet". Available here.
    Another point is that the 7% statistic may be skewed, because some of the people surveyed didn't consider all mail to be SPAM (ie, they requested the special offers / catalogs / etc by email)