NYT on Spam Cops

yet another coward writes "The New York Times reports on new measures against spam. (Sperm sample required, sorry ladies) Microsoft has increased efforts to track and prosecute spammers. Hotmail receives 2 billion (2 * 10^9) spam messages per day. In a twist of weirdness, the Direct Marketing Association is funding investigators who cooperate with the FBI on spam investigations. Spamhaus also gets a mention."

Comments

Futureproofing Spamhaus

[alanxyzzy]

In related news, Spamhaus has announced a Funding model based on charging large corporate networks a yearly fee for our Data Feed rsync/ixfr service.

The public DNSBL service will remain free.

Re:Article text. Mod Down; Copyright Infringement

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Regardless of whether this was posted for karma or to benefit other users here, it is still copyright infringement.

Cool - then just do it this way then.

Made from This Page.

The DMA hates spammers (true)

[Random BedHead Ed]

In a twist of weirdness, the Direct Marketing Association is funding investigators who cooperate with the FBI on spam investigations.

Not much of a twist at all, despite many of the above comments. Just grok this: the DMA hates spammers. No, really. I know someone who works for a company that's part of the DMA, and spam is her biggest headache. While we all hate commercial e-mail in general, the DMA is made up of companies who want to play by the rules. True, they want to have a hand in writing the rules as well, but the rules are pretty good ones. No faking your source IP addresses or From: fields. Always have an Unsubscribe feature that actually works. And so forth.

Spammers make the DMA's life a living hell. It's impossible to have a conversation with most people about legitimate commercial e-mail because illegitmate spam is such a pain (I just deleted 20 spams, vs. three real messages in my Lycos mail). With an annoyance like spam, no one even wants to hear the DMA's side of the story. So the DMA's members get blocked from sending e-mail by many sysadmins (like me).

If all commercial mail conformed to the rules that the DMA advocates, no one would complain to ISPs about commercial mail because the power to prevent it would be in the hands of the recipient. Just click Unsubscribe and you're free and clear. Until spammers go away, that's impossible because no one trusts Unsubscribe links. It shouldn't surprise us that the DMA will do anything they can to prevent spam.