Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Will Sell Whitelist Services For Hotmail
Ec|ipse writes "Looks like Microsoft has found another way to make money, this time from spam. Microsoft has adopted a "whitelist" program (Bonded Sender by IronPort) which will allow marketers to pay Microsoft so that they are included on a special whitelist, guaranteeing uninteruptable delivery of their messages to Hotmail and MSN users. You can catch the full article at Excite. I especially like the nice naming for spammers, calling them 'marketers' sounds so much more legitimate."
mgibbs adds "Hopefully the $20K fine that results from abuse of this system is enough to deter spammers."
Spam the hell out of everyone, sue the spammers for profit, and then profit from the whitelists.
1/ make spamming easy 2/ make spamming hard 3/ profit.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
When will we see the new comic book, "Spam Assassin versus the Marketeer"!?
Get a hold of the whitelist, and you can immediately add it to your OWN spam filter! Nice of Microsoft to offer to collect all, umm, marketers in one place...
The problem is that Business People just don't care about doing what is right for the customer. Bill is a business man, get used to it !
And then they will charge users extra for "adv free" service. Oh wait, I thought they were talking about phone companies.
.... to keep spammers in business.
... free ain't always cheap. :-P
What I wonder is if the people that actually PAID for the service get screwed equally by the 'marketers' as the cheapskates...
I wouldn't mind spam so much if it actually had any relevance to me.
.uk so it shouldn't be too hard to work out
I live in the UK and nearly almost all my spam offers me services in the UK.
My email address does end in
Sorry to give you one less reason to hate MS, but they are taking the money as a BOND, not as payment. MS only gets the money if the spammers don't follow their rules. Probably something like "must use real return address and have a unsubscribe link that doesn't add you to more lists."
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
Looks like they've just pointed a double barrelled gun at their feet. If they were trying to avoid wholesale migration away to either:
- Google's Gmail OR
- Novell's MyRealEmail....
Then this is a f***ing dozey way to do it!
Linux fan and Win32 developer
So you pay Microsoft and you by-pass Hotmail's spam filters?
From what I hear from friends with Hotmail accounts, paying for that priviledge is definitely not necessary.
The good people at ninnle.org will never sell their subscriber lists to anybody!
I was *just* recently sitting here and wondering if there was anything Microsoft could have done to squander the product, userbase and public goodwill MS inherited when they bought Hotmail that they haven't done already.
/. article right now..
I couldn't think of anything
I guess I'm just not as imaginative as MS.
I'll bet the GMail team is doing a little dance of joy at reading this
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Ok, so now someone else wants to be the trust authority which was a major issue with the X.400 nonense. This one wants to charge everyone that has a domain $375 for an application fee and then $500/yr for less than 1/2 million messages a year.
I cert.ainl.y H-O-P-E th4t it d0es a G o o d job
Props to GNAA!
In a way, since Microsoft runs these mailservers, the spammers will be paying for the server bandwidth consumption their spam blasts are incurring. This is no more pleasant a thing, but not different than people filling up your mailbox with junk flyers and coupons. Where you're going to see people making trouble is at the borders of Microsoft's network in terms of SMTP relays. Those people are going to be processing this for-profit spam traffic and getting nothing out of it.
Giving their users another reason to switch to Gmail.
Though, trying to drive away as many users as possible has worked for them in the past.
If it weren't Microsoft, but a "respected" ISP that did this, would we blame them for it?
I suppose we all realize that spam isn't going to go away, and that it's costing ISP's quite a bit of money in bandwidth.
I'm not condoning Microsoft's move, but it does seem like good business sense to me.
I only use hotmail accounts as spambait anyway... so who cares...
I had an hotmail address years ago, back in the day before MS buy the domain... I never really used it... and I still don't know why people need an hotmail address? passport thing? you can live without it and without MSNM you know...
/. should make a poll to know who has and who hasn't an hotmail address, and in comments we would know why people who has one, well... has one.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
So, Once again they get the little guy. What about that small nonprofit running their own mail server. Or that small business running their own mail server. They have to pay the same as the big business.
Large companies can afford to drop a payment on this but the small business/non-profit sure can't.
Evolution or ID?
WASHINGTON, May 5 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) said on Wednesday it has adopted an e-mail "whitelist" program by IronPort Systems Inc. that will allow legitimate marketers to thread the gauntlet of spam filters protecting its inboxes.
From the company that brought you "Microsoft Works" now comes the new oxymoron, "legitimate marketers".
One can only imagine what is being built into LongHorn to ensure this kind of business model continues.
So, everyone just blocks MSN and HotMail period! So long "marketeers" and their funny little noses and tails.
Yahoo Mail has been doing this for years with companies like Buy.com.
The message they're sending is spam is fine as long as there's something in it for us. What do they care if they're servers are hosed and you frequently can't retrieve even legitimate mail?
Yahoo has been doing this for a LONG time.
they have their "spam" filtering yet there are types of spam that will not go away as they have "special" spam from their "partners" that will NEVER EVER hit their filtering rules for spam.
I am betting that ALL free email sites will do this within this year.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In Denmark the marketing rules forbid people to send uninvited marketing material. Unless you specifically accept to receive it - it will be illegal (and punishable by court) to send it. This law is not only to electronic e-mails but goes to all kinds of marketing. You are not allowed to call by phone to someone in order to sell them something (unless the user has registered his phone number somewhere and accepted to receive a phone call).
So unless you check the checkbox somewhere in your hotmail registration, you will be able to sue MS - in Denmark at least...
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
Hence, to my inbox, even a legitimate marketer is a spammer if I do not want any unsolicited mail.
I use my "not junk"/safe list to allow mailing lists through.
... hundreds of thousands of Hotmail users complain about getting too much spam. Then Microsoft introduces cool new feature - switch to pay-version of Hotmail and stop getting spam! Of course, once you switch, you'll still be getting spam, but Bill Gates will swear, foaming at the mouth, that the only spam pay users get is the one that somehow gets through the filter, and is illegal.. What can I say, Bill Gates is a genius.
or is everyone completely against MS making any money whatsoever? The Bonded Sender program looks like it will actually be really useful for 90% of Hotmail users, the ones who use it for their normal e-mail address, rather than the ones who just use it for MSN access. I've used Hotmail for the past 5 years, and have only ever had problems with spam from companies that really have nothing to offer, or cba with writing decent adverts. I think MS, if it has any sense (there goes my argument), will start refusing access to those kind of companies, and the spam that is actually put through will be of a higher quality and maybe even relevant (in a GMail kinda way?) Then again, I might be completely wrong.
How long until some tech leaks a copy of this whitelist... hello blocklist!
I'd accept all the spam in the world if they paid me 15 cents per message. That would make spam much cheaper than bulk mail and would weed out marketers who aren't serious.
If a company is going to sell my resources (time spent downloading/reading/procesing email) they had better share the revenues with me.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
>> calling them 'marketers' sounds so much more legitimate
All marketers are evil, whether they use spam or not.
Whitelists simply ALLOW more email through. They can dress this up with as many terms like "legitimate marketers" but it does not change the fact that they are basically allowing companies to spam their users (for a fee). In the end you are guaranteed to have more spam.
I can't wait to here the marketing spin they put on this one.
It's all about business. MS thinks it can make easy money from companies that are willing to pay to ensure their mail flow there. Spammers who don't think they can earn $20k by spamming hotmail accounts won't bother. IMO MS has right to do whatever it wants with it's mail system.
I could sell spoiled herrings if I like. If someone is willing to pay me for those, it's not of anybody else's business, as far as we are not breaking the law.
I guess this is part of MS's "pay for sending mail" program of which Bill Gates spoke months ago. Permanent fix for spam problem? No, but it's an MS solution, so we don't expect it to work.
?SYNTAX ERROR
Yup, I guess it does give them the right to do that.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
When I first read that tidbit yesterday, I assumed it was so Microsoft could snoop on all future Windows machines. Now in ADDITION to that potential, they can beam you uninterruptible spam!
So, is there any chance that if those features are advertised widely, fewer people will buy Longhorn?
This is yet another thing Google will never attempt to do to us.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.
Join em. 'nuff said.
I fail to understand why anyone even bothers with hotmail anymore. There's nothing less professional looking than putting a free-email address on your business card or website.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
Since a vast majority of SPAM that I get are from throw-away domains, I see some value in this as well. It would, for instance, be nice if I didn't have to comb through my JUNK box looking for missing Emails from one of the many product specific Mail lists that I'm a member of.
However, Mail lists are usually on independant and under-funded sites, so it's unlikely that they'd be able to afford to become IronPort certified anyway.
SourceForge would be a good start though.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
otherwise, $20K for a once-off spamming of the hotmail userbase might make this worthwhile.
My company was informed of this bonded sender program by MSN/Hotmail support 2 months ago. At the time they claimed the Bonded Sender program was a third-party service with no affiliation to MSN/Hotmail or Microsoft. At the same time, they also claimed that even if you DO subscribe to the bonded sender program MSN/Hotmail will give no guarantee that your emails will be delivered!
allow legitimate marketers to thread the gauntlet of spam filters
- run the gauntlet
- thread the needle
choose one.D.
Just because you can't, doesn't mean you shouldn't.
So whatever the spammers pay to Microsoft, they won't make it up to my whitelist. And because of that they won't even get an answer by my vacation reply when I'm out of the office. :-)
I'm thinking about the one involving putting the fox to guard the chickens.
Seriously, I hope this convinces people to not use Hotmail etc - now with guaranteed spam...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
I guess I'll have to put that "Block" button to more use now.
There's never enough when you have too little
So now MS will have the monopoly on Spam too?
Free Firefox news reader.
According to the fees page at bondedsender.com, $20 is taken out of the bond for each complaint received over some very small minimum. Sending a complaint for each bondedsender mail will cost the spammer $20! Haha! Now if only I could see some of that money.
when you have semi-legitimate unsolicited email "marketers" tossing that much money around hopefully some information about the company will leak out and we can use that information for blacklists and baseball bats.
As has already been pointed out, this is a bonding service - not a straight for profit medium for Microsoft.
My biggest questions is When a company breaks the rules, where does the bonded money go??
My other problem is that this in an opt-out service. I would prefer to see an opt-in only service, but that would pretty much invalidate the idea of a global whitelist, wouldn't it.
I just hope that microsoft doesn't think this is the end all answer to spam filtering. Bill Gates stated in the Washington Post back in November that MS would eliminate spam within I think the next 2 or 5 years (something like that). This certainly is NOT the answer.
And just when I thought they couldn't sink much lower.
I will say this much. The advertisers should be paying the END USERS if they want to get people to read their drenn. They're the ones who are getting their mailbox stuffed anyway.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I am an engineer in charge of a large email system. We send millions of emails per week to our members. I have contacts in the top 10 ISP's and we're on no RBL's of consequence (the big 10 RBL's are clean, we are not concerned about the RBL run by sn0rky in his dorm room). Rarely do we have a delivery problem, however we did decide to get Bonded since it looks like a good program for responsible mailers.
The BondedSender process looked us over and saw that we had, *gasp*, 50 complaints with a volume of 20 million messages sent. One complaint per million is their threshold for acceptance into the program! This is unreasonable. People complain about messages from their own damn family in my experience. The geeks here wont understand because they are literate of the issues surrounding the politics of email... but your average citizen is going to flip out and start whacking the "report as spam" button for anything they don't want to receive: their buddy sending them a dirty joke they don't want, an alert from their bank about their account being low, mailings from their girlfriend breaking up with them, etc.
This is absolutely true. I've heard the horror stories from my contacts at the aforementioned top 10 ISP's. The number of complaints they get about private emailings to and from their own contact lists rivals the number of messages that are actually spam.
I have an associate that works at large-bank-corp and they get about 1 per 10,000 complaints for their goddamn credit card statements!
BondedSender will be short lived unless they relax their restrictions. Any spammer sending pr0n and v|agra mailings is going to not be interested in this deal simply because of the costs and hassle of getting bonded. It's cheaper for Ma Bulker to just switch ISP's every two weeks or scam open relays.
Anyway... that's my say... Good luck if you try getting Bonded.
However, that makes my email address less useful, and Usenet a less useful resource.
I've never disguised my email address on Usenet or anywhere else (with the exception of some of the more pointless web site registrations). There have been plenty of times I've gone back to ancient archives digging for answers, come across someone who solved almost what I'm trying to do, and sent them an email asking if they'd mind helping me. And the converse has happened too - many people I don't know have emailed me over the years after coming across old posts, and I've helped out where possible.
I'm pretty defiant over this one. I refuse let low-life scum dictate how I can use my address. I am not going to jump through hoops at their behest - my email address is a contact point, and people should be able to use it to contact me.
Cheers,
Ian
It almost makes you want to cheer on the spammers
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
I mean, if I am to enter my mail somewhere on the internet, it's my (long deactivated) hotmail account that I am using exactly for this purposes. And on my everyday mail account, I don not get much spam on that one. I mean, come on. If you were thinking that free online services will stay free, then you did never think about the money one can make of advertising. So this is rather natural, I suppose. Why not move to another provider? There are lots...
Black holes were created when god tried to divide by zero
Coming soon: AllAdvantage for e-mail!
(Ha ha, only serious. With current trends in Internet advertising, who knows?)
Personally, I don't find the proposition too attractive. There are more dignified ways of selling yourself for money -- say, hawking your organs for cash. (What did you think I was going to say?)
Microsoft Windows is, fittingly, the official Desktop OS of Olig
MicroSoft isn't selling anything, they are using the services of another company, namely bondedsender.com.
Who are bondedsender? They are part of ironport systems, who also own spamcop.net. Spam reported to spamcop.net automatically gets reported to bondedsender.com and the spammer gets whacked.
This is really good news because spamcop.net/ironport were recently sued by the spammer snotty scott richter. This means that ironport will have more income to not only fight the spam lawsuit but fight spam in general.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
Anyone thinking there is a greed motive for this is wrong. There is no way that Microsoft would trade this much bad press for the paltry amounts of money that this could generate. So, here's what I think is happening.
Microsoft has been pursuing various antispam paths, but the ultimate one, enforceable legislation to stop it, has encountered some resistance unless the legislation's effects are limited in some way. I think they are trying to counter some of this resistance.
There are occassions that I get "spam" from software companies (whose products I've used in the past) advertising new products. I don't mind that kind of spam, yet I almost always find them in my spam box because I use a pure white list approach and forgot to put the company on my white list.
The kind of spam that really drives me nuts and causes me to switch addresses is the spam that's looking for that one sucker in a million, the viagra spam, the refinancing spam, and the pornographic spam.
If the guidelines a) ban the improper spam while allowing contacts from other companies and b) strongly enforce requests to remove my email from a list, I could live with this system. Especially if they implement a one stop shop to manage whose lists I'm removed from.
But why would I want to live with this? Because it cuts the only leg of the spammers arguments that has been getting any mileage at all out from under them. If you create an enforceable system and say, "you can spam if you follow the rules of this system", then they can't argue that their "legitimate" spam is being blocked anymore and all antispam legislation suddenly gets a green light.
trying to make money wholly by making a quality product and selling it at a profit, people will stop complaining about Microsoft trying to make money.
But I do not think you will see it happening until then.
My $0.02 worth! The more you tighten your grip, Gates, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. -Princess Leia (modified)
NinnleMail? These people are amazing! They're just as innovative, of not more so, than Google! Have they gone public yet?
But I wonder how profitable spam is to the spammers anymore. I can see how it may have been profitable when it was "new" ie most users were too trustoworthy of what was sent to them in the mail, however I would hope most people have wisened up, just as the volume of spam is increasing. I mean, how many times can you get a response that you were approved for a mortgage application that you never applied for or how many obscure dead relatives who work for Nigerian companies do people think they can have? /. ers think about this.
I know that you only need a small percentage of responses from spam to make it profitable, but do you think that spam will eventually collapse upon itself, both through improved filtering(though this is obviously a step in the wrong direction) and people just getting smart to the point where nobody responds to the emails anymore?
I'm curious as to what
I read thru BondedSender's terms of service. Their allowed complaint rate is 1 per 1,000,000 messages sent. Each complaint over that limit deducts $20 from the sender's bond.
As someone that does legitimate commercial mailings (opt-in, for our MMORPG, about 15,000 messages per month to current and past players), this strikes me as slightly expensive, and somewhat dangerous. Some math...
Typically I get about 10 angry letters per newsletter, so that's $200 to send each newsletter. A cost of 1.3 cents per email isn't bad, since I know that most people read what I send.
Two problems. First, most newsletters go through now. Maybe 10% get spam filtered (I should probably set up a way to track this). So reaching those additional people costs 13 cents each. That is expensive.
Second, I worry that if the system becomes well known, it would be griefed: A single player with a bone to pick would sign up under a bunch of email addresses and "complain" from each. I'm not sure how to resolve this.
If you actually want high-quality service, guarantees, etc., etc., maybe you should PAY FOR IT??!!
It's free, and you get what you pay for. Don't like it? Go somewhere else.
Many ISPs will sell webmail/pop service for $20/year or less.
All the mail I get at Hotmail is spam anyway. It's my spam-catcher account. Anything I have to sign up for on the net gets the hotmail account. Anything on the net you sign up for where I actually want to receive it, goes to yahoo. Both are actually spam-catchers.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
Now my free hotmail account truly becomes worth every penny I have paid for it.
Sheesh.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
So just imagine, in a year or so... Microsoft whitelists some spammers. Then Microsoft developes Outlook enhancements to block MSN-enabled spammers, for a minor upgrade cost. Then Microsoft MSN finds a way around this, for their premium spammers for an extra fee. Then there's always Microsoft, who promptly developes new Windows and Outlook work-arounds necessarily to close the viral windows enabling the premium ones... for a minor fee to the users.
But, ironically, I don't believe they do this on purpose. It's more like virus writers vs Norton Anti-Virus or a game of chess, with two entirely different sides that just coincidentally are under the same corporate umbrella.
I would expect that M$ - excelling in ripping its clients, will go even further:
...
There will be several tiers of clients:
class 0
class 1
class 2
etc...
The higher class you have - the more you will have to pay for the account, the less spam you get the more spammers will have to pay to spam you
IronPort is NOT Microsoft! IronPort is selling a service which Microsoft has purchased for the purpose of using on Microsoft's Hotmail (and MSN) mail service.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
You know what I love about Ironports? They sell the disease and the cure. They do business with just about everyone. They offer to sell you anti-spam solutions but at the same time sell equipment to people like Scott Ricktor so he can blast spam all over the place...
Sell a better spam engine, offer a better spam protection device!
I love it.
Keep in mind though, Ironport has been playing both sides.
Consider also that Ironport was founded by Microsoft / Hotmail execs, and it all looks a little fishy.
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
The original poster assumed that Microsoft is opening the door to spammers. What is unsaid in the article is if these e-mails were actually solicited.
I could see that legit ads (i.e. you definitely signed up to recieve them) might be tossed out with the huge amount of spam. What Microsoft *might* be doing here is saying "OK, you say you are opt-in, we'll let your stuff through, but we're gonna take a bite out of you if you are lying to us."
Unfortunately, the author of the article didn't bother to state exactly what the rules are that Microsoft is imposing. Roast the journalist, not Microsoft (at least, not yet).
Do any journalists know how to use english? ... thread the gauntlet ...
I know I know, totally off topic. Reminds me of the last time I spoke to a faux-American call center phonejockey. They started joking with me about the weather in Michigan which was where I called from. I was almost fooled (no, not in the least) until at the end of the call they wished me a good evening. It was 10AM.
Don't try so hard and maybe we might buy it. Also, why are the Benedict Arnold CEOs whining about being called to the task? Own it dude and be proud of it. I own the stock. Make me some money dammit.
Speak truth to power.
The bond is held by BondedSender, i.e. IronPort, not Microsoft. According to their site "Proceeds from bond debits are not retained by IronPort Systems and are instead shared with third-party non-profit organizations."
This system could potentially hurt many small hosting companies and small businesses. Businesses that have their own mail servers, or small hosts that provide mail services for their clients are now going to have to pay more just to provide basic mail service. Telling people "sorry, you can't send to MSN accounts" is simply not acceptable. It doesn't matter if it's a bond or not, the fact is that a small host now has to pay a lot of money to provide an essential service to it's clients. IronPort could essentially charge whatever they want if they own exclusive rights with MS for this service.
This approach form Microsoft is scary as hell for small hosts/providers and I hope that it doesn't happen if there is only one whitelist that MS goes with. If there were multiple whitelists, then I'd feel much more comfortable.
Monitor bandwidth usage on IIS6 in real-time: http://www.waetech.com/services/iisbm/
Unless I'm missing something, neither MSN nor Hotmail comprises such a neighborhood.
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
They stole my privacy with calls during dinner and had the audacity to try to sell it back with a special privacy "service."
--
Kidnapping and ransom.
--
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
Can i opt out of this so-called 'whitelist'?
The only people that should be in a whitelist is the ones you personally approve..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Spam? Oh, that is soooo 2003. Spam isn't supposed to be around anymore. There's a big Federal Law that was supposed to take care of that.
This is a very misleading summary. Basically, the bonded program (which even spamassassin recongnizes and assignes according a minus "point") requires mailers to put up a bond before their emails are allowed. They still cannot send spam, however, they may only send mail to registered users. If users complain, the company has to either prove they joined or pay up.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Just because you can't, doesn't mean you shouldn't. :p
Because My hotmail account wasn't already COMPLETELY DECIATED by the last wave of spam from the last time someone got their hands on their email list....
The only reason I still have an account there is so that anytime a webform wants my email and I think they might actually send me a confirmation/activation email I might have a chance to pluck it our of the "send all emails not in my contacts list to the hopper" processor.
Feh a little more spam can't hurt hotmail, it's like taking a leak in the ocean.
n/t
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
IronPort's Whitelist access is available, here.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Oh well, I'll just continue to use Mailwasher to cleanse my Hotmail account. It works nicely. Well worth the registration fee.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Isn't this what the mafia does? Pay us what we's wants or you's can't do business here!
M$ is just doing it through filters rather then Bruno and the brute squad. Well, I guess shady business gets to deal with shady business...
Where does the white go when snow melts?
First they start patenting ancient stuff like FAT, now they're trying to make money out of spam. I'm glad I have [cough] copies of all their software - I'd hate to think I was funding this lot in any way.
I have assumed that they have always had a whitelist. I have reported the same spams coming from the same address hundreds of times and they still don't get delivered to my junk folder. I just assumed they had a deal with Microsoft.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
I prefer the term "high volume email deployers" as coined on The Daily Show.
"You wanna see my ticket? Ok... here's my name on the ticket. If it was your ticket it would say "F*cking Douchebag."
Ironport's "sender" site.
IronPort's "receiver" site.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I got a Hotmail account, but the only e-mails there is the promotional letters from MSN network of ads talking about its exclusive 30MB mailbox costing $X per month.
Finally today, I know why MSN needs to sale that kind of services, because MS does have a white list to fill your mailbox up.
The SpamAssassin test USER_IN_DEF_WHITELIST checks to see if the sender is in the list of companies that are on its built-in white list. Network Solutions, internic, register.com, nytimes.com, amazon.com, mypoints, paypal, the FT, Palm, Handspring and others are all on it. They don't sell access to it, so it is not the same as what Microsoft is doing. It is similar, however, in that some companies get a free pass (well, up to -15) for any mail that they send out.
-- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
Does anybody not realize that Hotmail is a free service! How can you complain about a Free service recieving spam mail. How can you sue somebody or even enforce an Anti-Spam law when you do not even pay for it. So in reality, the money for any infraction should go to Microsoft. I know they offer a pay service as well, but that is so your account is not frozen after 30 days of inactivity. If you are using a Hotmail or Yahoo account for your primary business email then you really need help. I always am very suspecious of people that provide me a contact email with Yahoo, Hotmail or any other Free type mail provider.
It's like they don't want to have users. They're stupidly pushing everyone to GMail.
"GMail: It tastes like candy!"
- - - - - - -
"All hail the glory of the Hypnotoad."
I totally agree with a upper post.
:
Why use Hotmail ? Convenient ? Ad-free(no, i'm kidding)?
And so what, lazy people of Earth, who do not want to look a bit further, Hotmail isn't the only free Webmail, is it ?
Okay, just a little list
*IcqMail
www.icqmail.com : up to 5 mailboxes per ICQ# you have...
*YOUR ISP
www.[your isp name].[your country code] : usually more or less 5 mailboxes. Just get one for your junk...
*Others ISP (free ones)
Living in France, I can tell about www.free.fr, yahoo(.fr,.co.uk,.anythingelse...), laposte.net(up to infinity mailboxes per capita), Gmail(coming soon to you...),etc
So, please, stop complaining about M$'s Hotmail, don't use it, and let spammers take care of the Hotmailers, they pay for it, so they'll mail first hotmail.
*squeak*
Okay, people, there are about two clueful people who have posted so far, and about 50 idiots who are yelling "Microsoft is taking money to allow spamming". READ THE ARTICLE. Holy shit.
For those too st00pid to read it, here's your list of clues. Microsoft gets no money, IronPort gets the money.
If you're a legitimate emailer (i.e. you email to people who have asked for email) IronPort takes the $20K up front as a bond. If you spam, you get knocked off the whitelist and they take your $20K.
It's not "pay $20K and spam all you want". It's "put up $20K to say that you won't spam".
As someone else here said, their standards are *very* high. You must have no more than 1 complaint per million emails, which is a very low number. Having run double-opt-in lists myself before, I assure you that cluefucks will complain about something that they signed up for (and confirmed) the day before.
As an ISP, let me say that this is a great program.
They are very anal
Do you have ESP?
I can now spam all hotmail users at least once for a mere $0.0001 per head maximum.
Don't put off until tomorrow what you can leave until the day after.
I had an hotmail address years ago, back in the day before MS buy the domain... I never really used it.
I did too, and I used it a lot. When MS implemented Passport, it drove them nuts that my old Hotmail profile didn't have all the personal information they wanted to collect. Whenever I tried to access another service from Hotmail, like Calendar, it wouldn't let me unless I entered more personal info. So I didn't. It eventually got all spammed up, so I set up a whitelist and used it only for certain things. Eventually, MS made a new rule that if you didn't log in for 30 days your account was suspended - to reactivate you had to, you guessed it, sign up for Passport with all your personal info. So that was the end of my Hotmail account.
It may be illegal here, but how did you plan to go about if you receive an American/Nigerian spam? 99.9% of the junk does definitely NOT come from a Danish sender or even a Danish server. Who are you gonna sue?
You know, there was a senator who once proposed a e-mail tax. If thise kind of under-the-table loopholes could be closed, especially to the big companies like MS, maybe tax wouldn't be such a bad idea...given that we would find a solution to bad internet buisness.
Ok, since it's clearly some reference to some civil war crap we oceanans know nothing about, WTF is a Benedict Arnold CEO???
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Now, hotmail is crap. Within minutes of signing up for an account it has reached its capacity of SPAM and starts rejecting messages from being sent to it, at least it did the last time I tried using it about 3 yrs ago. A hotmail account these days is an invitation to SPAM, and to being filtered as SPAM by accident by an over zealous SPAM filter. If this change could revitalize hotmail, make it free, and have a useful amount of space, I might consider using it again. If I hadn't learned how to set up a mail server running Gentoo.
~ there are 10 types of people in this world, those that can read binary and those that can't
Isn't this just like paying protection to the mob? It's worthy of Tony Soprano. "Having a problem with spam? I can take care of dat for youse. My boys will be around once a month to collect". Call it what you will, it still seems to be extortion and a clear violation of racketeering laws.
This whitelist will be automatically added to Blacklists. This sounds like microsoft are saying give us some money and we will let you spam to your hearts content.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
Because I don't, never have, and never will use Hotmail. who cares? Oh wait, there are millions of cheap suckers that do.
IronPort
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
People here should know that putting a pricetag on something doesn't make everything kosher.
A very good point, in general. Yet as an adult I feel i have the right to enter business relationships - there is nothign wrong with selling my email processing labor. As long as the consumer retains control, I see no problem with bulk e-mail. With control of the system, I can easily raise the price of spam delivery to 50 cents or a dollar per message if the 15 cents/spam is generating too much volume.
Bulk mail without opt-in should be criminalized regardless if the envelope is paper, SMTP or whatever. Bulk mail is just another form of 'I have money, I can send propaganda to anybody, you cannot stop me, muahahaha!".
I'm not sure I want the government holding my hand and deciding what is good for everyone and what is not. I don't even see how the government can regulate spam given the international nature of it and the fact that commercial email has legitimate uses such as when my airline emails me that my flight schedule has changed or tells me of upcoming airfare sales.
To me, the greatest scheme for controlling spam would be monetary -- the spammer pays the recipient an amount that the recipient decides and the sender agrees to. Add recipient-controlled whitelists, blacklists, and rebates and the system provide zero-cost email between friends and trusted parties and consumer-regulated communications otherwise. This avoids the heavy-handed, one-size fits all approach of government regulation and pays each recipient for the resources consumed by spam as judged by the recipient. If someone hates spam so much, they can set their price at $100 per email.
The big problem with the current system is that the recipient bears a disproportinate burden of the costs. The cost to send an email is miniscule. But the cost to personally accept, read and process an e-mail is large. All I seek is a means of charging for my labor.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It doesn't count as spam if it's included in the sign-up agreement. If you agree to receive advertisements from 'marketers' that MS allows, then it doesn't count as 'unwanted/unrequested advertisements' (no matter how much you don't want it) because it was a prerequisite for using the service. Get a real email address if you want out, plain and simple.
thehomeland(.org)
I was about to import it into my spam blacklist.
Ok, since it's clearly some reference to some civil war crap we oceanans know nothing about, WTF is a Benedict Arnold CEO???
OMFG WTF LOL!!!11onehundredelevenone. First off, don't pretend to know something you don't. Benedict Arnold was alive around the time of the American Revolution, not the American Civil War. However, I'm willing to give you partial credit because many scholars believe the Civil War was mostly unfinished business from the Revolution.
Seriously though, if google is such a fine substitute for inherently knowing anything to the point of being worshipped as a False God of Knowledge.. why don't you just look it up yourself? Here's a spoon-sized poke at your badger. Traitors (such an ugly word) don't find favor with anyone after the fact. Once you betray something as large as oh I don't know.. your country it is hard nay impossible to earn the trust of anyone again.
Speak truth to power.
Fron the list of Directors at Ironport.com:
JACK SMITH: CO-FOUNDER AND INVENTOR, HOTMAIL CORPORATION
"...After the acquisition, Smith worked as Director of Engineering at Microsoft...then leading a team developing next generation Internet software infrastructure."
DOUGLAS C. CARLISLE: MANAGING DIRECTOR, MENLO VENTURES
Former board memeber of Hotmail.
SCOTT BANISTER: CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
"Scott started his career as a pioneer in the email business. He was founder and VP Technology of ListBot...ListBot was acquired and became Microsoft's ListBuilderTM, part of the bCentralTM suite of business offerings..."
SCOTT WEISS: CEO
"...Scott was one of the early team members at Hotmail, the world's largest web-based email service. At Hotmail, Scott was responsible for all partnership and revenue generating business development efforts. It was this experience at Hotmail that helped Scott identify the emerging business opportunity that would later evolve into IronPort Systems. After Hotmail's acquisition by Microsoft, Scott led a business development team at Microsoft with the MSN division. "
No, they're not Microsoft. But they're dang close.
Every journalist knows they shouldnt put all their chickens in the same basket before they're hatched.
Microsoft's Hotmail and MSN e-mail services, which together claim 170 million regular users
Of course that includes the 169 million spoofed HotMail addresses in spam messages.
I must say I'm really disappointed in this. Ironport have generally been good guys, but their trust level just plumetted. If you read the sender standards page you'll notice that, while they are at least trying to rule out some of the worst spam, their standards explicitly do allow spam (by diluting the concept of 'consent' to the point it's unverifiable and thus meaningless.) On the other hand, it doesn't sound like they're going to try to adjudicate complaints, just charge a small fee for each one and make judgements based on the sheer number of complaints, so it will be interesting to see how that works out. If enough end-users refuse to tolerate spam, that could effectively keep it out of the whitelist, even though the 'standards' are written to allow it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Wrong war. It was the American Revolution, and google is your friend.
If you know that a particular site is on the whitelist it makes sense to route your spam via that site if you can.
Honeypot, flies, attract are some words that come to mind.
says Mr gates.
That'll be because its now been relabelled, legitimate commercial email..
same old story - change the rules..
Q. How many M$ programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. None, they make darkness the new standard...!!!
http://money.cnn.com/2004/05/05/technology/msft_sp am.reut/index.htm
This really sucks..
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese!
This doesn't jive with the terms on their website. Particularly read the section titled "consent." This section defines 'consent' so broadly as to include many cases where proof is not available, i.e. they do not require opt-ins be verified, they allow buying or renting lists from third parties, etc. They're explicitly allowing all the lame excuses spammers traditionally use when accused of spamming. So which is it - do they have to prove consent as you say, or do they not, as the official website says? This is very confusing.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Believe it or not, there ARE groups out there that advertise via email - but aren't spammers - that are arguably upset about spammers who clog inboxes.
One of them I buy stuff from infrequently - Overstock.com. I get an email from them every day, usually delete it right off, but I don't mind getting it because I did, indeed, sign up for it when I bought something from them the first time.
Ironport's service isn't just a "pay us lots of money and we'll look the other way" thing - the people in question do indeed have to stick to decent ethics about what they're selling, and to whom, and make sure it's damn easy to get off the list. So I view this as a relatively ambivalent thing.
It's not good, in the sense that spammers may manage to sneak in. But it's not bad, because the spammers will likely get zapped pretty fast, and because the idea of REAL companies putting up a bond of trust, "their money where their mouth is" so to speak with regard to a code of conduct, is a GOOD THING.
- M$ does a report on their email utilization to find a host that sends a lot of emails to their clients. (membership status, announcements, etc)
- hotmail filters these randomly into the junk bin, or just deletes the messages before they get received.
- the host gets complaints from users that they are not getting feedback they requested
- host contacts micrsoft, pays them money to hack a hole in their faulty false positive email filter.
- M$ profit.
To turn a profit, all they need to do is make their filter more and more restrictive, creating more and more false positives.The next step: email groups
keeping your users informed about their accounts or sending them receipts for purchase is not spam. But it is for hotmail.
why is no one complaining about all the false positives?
Consent
V. Participating Senders must ensure that consent with appropriate disclosure or a prior business relationship exists prior to sending Commercial or Promotional Email Messages.
Acceptable forms of consent include:
Double Opt-In: (sometimes referred to as 'Confirmed Opt-In'): The Recipient affirmatively requests to add his/her email address to a mailing list. The Recipient receives a confirmation email and the Recipient confirms his/her request by replying or visiting a provided URL.
Opt-In with Verification: The Recipient affirmatively requests to add his/her email address to a mailing list. The Recipient receives a verification email notifying him/her of the subscription and providing clear unsubscribe instructions.
Opt-In: The Recipient affirmatively requests to add his/her email address to a mailing list. Pre-Selected Option with Verification: The Recipient consents to have his/her email address added to a mailing list by leaving a clear and conspicuous pre-selected option intact. The Recipient receives a verification email notifying him/her of the subscription and providing clear unsubscribe instructions. Commercial or Promotional Email Messages sent under this form of consent must include clear and conspicuous identification that the message is an advertisement or solicitation.
Pre-Selected Option: The Recipient consents to have his/her email address added to a mailing list by leaving a clear and conspicuous pre-selected option intact. Commercial or Promotional Email Messages sent under this form of consent must include clear and conspicuous identification that the message is an advertisement or solicitation.
I struggled for days and days and all I got was this lousy sig.
So you agree with Microsoft that these people that are paying Hotmail to SPAM you are not actually spammers? You agree that they are "marketers"? IronPort is facilitating Microsoft in allowing these "marketers" to spam you. That's spam prevention???
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
You've never driven in Pittsburgh.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
If you have a hotmail account, you already know you can't block or filter to the trash any email from "staff@hotmail.com". It just isn't allowed. Of course, if you're like me, you only have the hotmail account for registering and you know it will only ever have spam, therefore you have everything go to the junk mail folder which will empty automatically. Only pitfall is I have to access it about once a month to prove it is "active".
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
It's a negative reaction to the piece of shit MS has turned HM into. It's nostalgia for days of yore when HotMail wasn't an endless commercial. The UI is now so completely overwhelmed by what MS thinks you might be interested in if you literally had shit for brains that considerate, thinking people take offense.
The reality is that they are going to plunge headfirst into more of this horse shit unless the userbase drops precipitously. I think they should just remove the email functionality and see how many idiots keep using it.
Seroiusly, I don't think Google would ever do something like this. Why can't it come soon enough?
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
"This market-based mechanism allows email senders to ensure their message gets to their end user, and provides corporate IT managers and ISPs with an objective way to ensure only unwanted messages get blocked. For FAQs and white papers describing the Bonded Sender program, visit http://www.bondedsender.com
Pardon my attitude, but if you ask me, they should be the ones coming to us to see if they're ATA, Serial-ATA, FC, or Serial-SCSI compatible. We have the expertise, they just write a driver.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I'm afraid you didn't segue very well into that sentence, so I'm really not sure what you meant, but if you meant "SourceForge should get signed up for this somehow", then that's the first thing I thought of when I read the post.
Every SourceForge email I get to my Yahoo[ungrammatical punctuation omitted] account ends up in my Bulk folder, and every time, I click the "Not Spam" button on it, but to no avail. Apparently some people think it's just easier to make email they signed up for go away by marking it as spam than by unsubscribing from the service, to the detriment of the other users of that service.
I don't know if Hotmail+SourceForge users are affected by this, but regardless, there are doubtless a lot of legitimate services that are pigeonholed because a sufficient percentage of users are misevaluating the emails from those services. It would be unfortunate if some totally non-marketing companies/orgs had to pay to make sure this didn't happen, and it still wouldn't help my old prof, meesh, who likes to send mass e-mails to all her old students, putting their names in the Bcc: field so that they don't get a 10k message with 8k of addresses and 2k of content (no explicit To: field? Must be spam!) but it would be better than nothing.
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
NOTE: I am only comparing the FREE accounts here, not the paid which have other services.
Yahoo does not force a "white list" on you. I have both a Yahoo account and a hotmail account. I have never received a "special" spam from a Yahoo partner. As ecklesweb states, this is a user preference (like the hotmail automatic subscriptions to newsletters) that can be turned off. I turned it off early on.
More importantly, Yahoo does have three levels of spam filtering - none, some, and strong. At the strong level, I have yet to have anything filtered that shouldn't be and I only come across about four a month that get through, which I can easily report as spam to improve Yahoo's filtering. This actually filters spam I have never before received based on other's reporting.
OTOH, hotmail's spam filtering is not really that -- it is a matter of filtering any emails not from a known contact or your safe list and blocking any emails from a black list you have to create. EXCEPT that they have this wonderfully small limit on the free accounts. Of course, I only use this account for registering, so it is nothing but a spam filter and I don't have to provide addresses that are safe or not safe.
Whoa. Had a wacked thought which may be totally off the map, but do any of these free email sites have access to your contact lists - basically the online version of your address book? How well secured is it from outside access? That would be a spammer's wet dream - a list of valid emails. (Okay, that could be taking conspiracy too far, but I also know just how insecure MS software has been.)
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Seems to me like this is a step in the direction of entities eventually only accepting mail from "whitelisted" persons or groups, which will in all likelihood lead to a "fee" to be on a whitelist, thereby causing e-mail to no longer be free...
Maybe I'm being short-sighted, but this sounds fishy to me..
Aren't they planning on "reading" your emails and then serving up targeted ads?
Not all that much different if you ask me.
I know I'm being cynical here, and some of you will think this is quite a stretch - but I gotta wonder if this same mindset will apply to decisions involving the Microsoft-backed hardware DRM schemes. That is, will "good corporate citizens" be given some sort of pass-through key to the DRM system, so they can provide (responsibly, of course) "helpful services" to the end user?
#DeleteChrome
I confidently predict, based on very consistent past behaviour by the Criminal Monopolist, that the whole thing will be a technical and security disaster, and will inflict massive damage and disruption worldwide.
Meanwhile, surely any attempt to extend Sir Scumbag's monopoly should surely result in action by the court? This is clearly an attempt (again, and again, and again...., like everything they do now, having long ago run out of anything approximating to innovation) to use their confirmed monopoly in one field to leverage the extension of it to another. The Scumbag basically wants to control all email in the world, in fact he needs to, because his paranoid psychotic mind compels him to, as it has compelled him to dominate every market he touches. He must be stopped.
Set up a shell company,
Get on Hotmail's Whitelist
Spam everyone inviting them to join Gmail.
Where did that "$20,000 bond" figure come from? BondedSender's price list starts at $200, for nonprofits. The "bond" for sending 5,000,000 spams is only $1000. And for $2000, you get to send 50,000,000 spams. Per month.
Snipped from http://www.bondedsender.com/fees.jsp , so you don't tucker yourselves out having to read a bunch of words...
describe RCVD_IN_BONDEDSENDER Received via a whitelisted Bonded Sender address
score RCVD_IN_BONDEDSENDER -100.000
Note that "-100.000". That says "accept this, even if it looks like spam". You might want to use, say, "-3.0" instead. Give them a little credit, but don't open the floodgates.
Watch for spam with the "RCVD_IN_BONDEDSENDER" flag in the X-Spam-Status header line. You might want to have Mozilla (I assume Slashdot readers aren't using Outlook) move such messages into a "Bonded Sender" folder. That lets you watch what they're sending.
As soon as you find a real spam passed by BondedSender, please post it to NANAE.
Microsoft really needs to do something about it's image -
Having been landed in court for antitrust violations and with their software needing updates every week, Microsoft are really looking bad, and people are really looking for an alternative.
With MacOS and Linux getting updated so much faster, the software Giant and Monopolist will need to act quick if it wants to stand any chance of making it through the to the next decade.
Yeah, but you have to admit the concept of non-repudiation for all messages is a great thing, and also the trusted cloud approach... I never saw spam in any of the X.400 systems that I monitored.
Of course, this system is much different since it's basically a pay-to-spam type of thing.
Someone is WRONG on the Internet!
>IronPort's business is SPAM prevention.
Uh, try again. IronPort's first, and still foremost product (i.e. the one that works well) is the number one SPAM CANNON (I mean Customer Relationship Management engine), which generates millions of messages per hour.
Now that that sending market is saturated, they have turned the same box around, and they are turning it into a SPAM catcher/filter (which turns out to be harder, as their tech support guys are discovering).
Now they are billing companies that are honest and need to send mail-- there are certainly lots of these!
Brilliant marketing, really, but let's go easy on the white hats.
So I guess everyone who sends mail to a user list is a spammer?
Come on. These users did not just mistakenly enter their address. They fill out an account form where the checkboxes for email are clearly marked. Their email addresses are not shared with anyone. Each mail that goes out to them has full details on how to unsubscribe. If they don't want to login to their account on the website to unsubscribe, they can reply, and it's read and handled by a human being. In addition, the emails contain no intentional misspellings or bayes word games.
I get tons of spam every day and I can tell the difference.
I opened a hotmail account once. My company decided to adopt MS Instant Messaging as a standard and I did not want to give out any real email addresses to set up the .NET Passport thingy so I createrd a new Hotmail account. I was recieving spam in the account within 24 hours.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
You need passport for MSN Messenger, and where I live msn-mess is the only way to go. IM market share is distributed quite distinctly in different countries and regions, as far as I can tell. No one here here wants to get into exotic things like IRC or Jabber. Or even AOL, you know - only 1 in 10 people I know is aware there's IM apart from MSN. Gaim obscures dif. protocols enough to make it less painful. But why do I bother talking to all that people anyway? Beats me. Must have something to do with pineapples.
O make me a mask
And I'll be cheaper, too!
This could be a great idea, although I would change one thing. Instead of the fine going into Microsoft's pocket, put it in the pocket of the poor soul who had to read the spam message. His time was wasted and he should be compensated for it.
Mod +5 Ingenious
Yet as an adult I feel i have the right to enter business relationships - there is nothign wrong with selling my email processing labor.
Yes, and people who want spam can ask for it, for those who say nothing, the law should say that you are not allowed to send them spam. The same could easily be applied to snail mail. The problem will be defining what "bad" bulk mail is. I would define it as anything that can be seen as an advertisement.
If someone hates spam so much, they can set their price at $100 per email.
Ridiculous. How can you expect to collect money from a party you have no business agreement with? To get your version to work you need lot's of regulation. You would have to rewrite laws about contracts and who knows what.
Why is opt-in so bad? I never said that people who want spam should be allowed to get it, all I'm saying is that you would have to get the recipients permission before sending, for example in the terms of service of your airline.
Spam by any other name...is still spam!
"Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes."
(If you can read this, you're overeducated.)
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
So, in the future if I'm a company and i want to send ANYONE e-mail, i must cough up 20 grand to be on the 'good guy list', else risk being flagged as spam before my customers even see the email?
....
Good way to weed out the smaller fish
---- Booth was a patriot ----
$2k per month just to connect, even if you are a White hat.
I can see room for lots of money to be made. Microsoft, in an effort to keep the public happy, will require that "marketers" sign an agreement to not send spam (which of course, the purpose of this whole thing is to send spam), but they will intentionally leave a loophole allowing "marketers" to relay spam.
These "marketers" will sign up with Microsoft, then relay spam in exchange for a small fee from the spammers.
This way everybody wins! Well, except the customers of course... but who cares about them really?
Hypocrisy is the 8th deadly sin.
The owner of the most spammed sites on the planet is partnering with the biggest spammer arms dealer to ensure open access to your Inbox for their customers
...as they deduct $20 for any spam complaint (beyond the very low permitted complaint level of 1 per million emails). They don't investigate the complaint's merits at all, they just deduct the money. This makes the system financially impossible for non-legitimate emailers (i.e. spammers).
From http://www.bondedsender.com/faqs/general.jsp#bond_ debits
What happens to the bond debits?
In order to avoid conflicts of interest, forfeited bonds are distributed to an independent, disinterested non-profit organization. Currently, bond debits go to the Internet Education Foundation. The Internet Education Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public and policymakers about the potential of a decentralized global Internet to promote democracy, communications, and commerce. You can find out more about the Internet Education Foundation at http://www.neted.org.
SpamAssassin gives a negative score to IP addresses listed in the IronPort bonded sender program. This has several times prevented my wife's email from her work address (at Charles Schwab) to our home machine from being mistakenly blocked; because she uses MS Outlook with "custom" stationaries, SA normally gives a pretty high score to her mail based on content checks alone.
The idea is similar to Habeas - use this service if your business is legitimate; spammer abuse will be dealt with by the provider (in this case, IronPort will take their deposit, and remove them from the whitelist).
I like this service. It is not a magic bullet, but one among many checks that is quite effective in more accurately block spam and only spam.
I have a hotmail account that I use only to complain about spam. The address in never listed anywhere. I use it for no other purpose. It has never recieved any spam. This may be because it is listed somewhere as a known malcontent, but to be fair, I see not evidence that MS sells addresses. This is very different from other services.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Perform a simple experiment.
Within a week, your experimental yahoo account will start getting viagra and grey-market software offers! Your control accounts will more than likely remain unmolested.
I'm not kidding.
Seriously, I have accounts that used to get zero spam until I started e-mailing people on hotmail. It wasn't until I ran a couple test messages from my spam-free yahoo account to the hotmail account that I realized how I got on the list.
It's TRUE!
Actually, I use Hotmail Popper to get the mail through POP3 and use an Outlook rule to get rid of these messages. Then, it is accessed every day (or so).
However, it's now shareware - I still use the 2.1.1 freeware version and it works fine. Could email you it from "dg dg 83 p at hot mail" if you want it.
I can see this whole thing just mealting down to be a mechanism whereby MS periodically smacks a spammer's hand and takes the $20k or part thereof. Nice money for MS, nice legitimised biz for spammers. Everyone wins except the abusee.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Who the hell uses hotmail for real email? I've got a couple of hotmail accounts which I use to register with some websites where you're not allowed access till you're registered. Most of these dump their cr*p in my hotmail account, in addition to the 2 bajillion viagra, mortgage, loan, and sexy babe emails every day.
If hotmail were shut down, that would reduce the world's spam numbers by 70%.
What article were you reading?
-David
"Clearly on one side of the battle" you say, well lets see what side that is, shall we? A little trip through the WayBack machine is in order, I think...
:-\
IronPort's original product
Hmm, what is that? Oh yes, it's the first product IronPort Systems ever sold. What does it do? Why, it sends up to 500,000 messages an hour and opens up to 10,000 simultaneous connections! Yes, those certainly look like "anti-spam" measures to me.
Let's take another snapshot from the Internet Archive, this time look at the news items at the bottom of the page: Interesting marketing tips from IronPort
Wow, most of them talk about "maximizing your e-marketing dollars" and "are you emails getting through?". Yep, looks like fighting against spam to me...
Here's another snippet, notice how they make mention of how well they deal with spam filters on the recipient's end. Also notice the words about multiple "campaigns" happening simultaneously and being able to assign 256 IPs to one device, hmm, why would you need 256 IPs to send e-mail? buy our servers because we try to evade spam filters!
In fact, while the first archive of www.IronPort.com is from Aug 26, 2001 it wasn't until Apr 02, 2003 that their "C series" was displayed. For close to 2 years they exclusively sold and marketed "marketing" servers before they ever came out with e-mail "protection" servers.
Even today, the bulk of the anti-spam functionality in their products comes from an OEM agreement with Brightmail, so that shows you how many of their own resources they been dedicating to "fighting" spam.
Now, I have some friends at IronPort and they're actually nice people (no sarcasm this time). One of them actually works in the Bonded Sender program and the people working in that program aren't exactly tolerating spam, so it's not like the company is pure evil.
If you look at the company history, though, it should be apparent which side they're on. Actually, just look at the featured customers on their website. Nearly all of them are customers of the e-mail sending servers, not the e-mail receiving models. I'm sure everyone is familiar with what an upstanding corporate citizen click.doubleclick is... featured IronPort customer.
All right, that's about enough. Hopefully I don't get k-lined tomorr... er, today
P.S. Nothing personal, I'm just setting the record straight.
Someone is WRONG on the Internet!
There was a time that I let my computer trust everything from Microsoft. Those days are long gone. Microsoft is no better or worse than anyone else that values profit over quality. I just don't trust anyone that is clearly geared that way.
As has already been stated, I use Hotmail for registration purposes only, now. There was a time I really liked Hotmail. That time was before M$ owned it.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
I have a Hotmail account that I don't receive any Spam on. I also have one that I do receive a lot on. There are spammers out there that know how big hotmail is and they program their email clients, or whatever program they use, to choose addresses at random. It's kind of like a password cracking program. If you choose your username like you choose your password, it will be harder for spammers to find you. I'd tell you what I did to prevent the spam, but then I'm sure the spam would start coming. I have a feeling spammers read /.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.