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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."
And then they will charge users extra for "adv free" service. Oh wait, I thought they were talking about phone companies.
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
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
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.
What difference does that make? They're still spamming. I don't care if they do have a valid return address: 'unsolicited' is still 'unsolicited'.
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.
The beef I have with this scheme is that since it's the user that's inconvenienced by the spam, the bond money should be sent to them in the event of a violation. The fact that Microsoft is the one getting the funds is what makes it seem like a money grab.
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.
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).
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====