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Spamhaus: MCI Makes $5M A Year In Spam Profits
An anonymous reader submits "According to a new Spamhaus report, MCI makes $5 million a year hosting spammers and illegal spamware. MCI/UUNET has long topped the Spamhaus spam supporting ISPs list, with nearly 200 active SBL entries. MCI even took on spammers such as iMedia, when they were terminated by Savvis in their half-hearted response to leaked pro-spam memos."
And in any event, one person's `spamware' may very well be another person's tool of choice for sending out mail to a large (and yet legitimate) mailing list.
Their gain of $5 million is costing companies many times that. That's why it's bad.
Still, this article shows several things. Lots of people complain that we can't do anything to stop spam without getting several countries to cooperate. While this might be true in the long run, we can still shut down all the spammers in the United States. One of the biggest ways we can stop spam is forcing ISPs to stop supporting it. I am not sure what could be done, but perhaps a large-scale boycott could have an effect?
Scott Simontis
ISPs should impose an E-embargo against MCI because they support spammers. All mail and traffic from MCI should be blocked until MCI stops helping spammers.
MCI is a $27 billion company. (according to http://global.mci.com/about/investor_relations/fun damentals/).
Corporately, they don't care about $5M revenue streams. If it's not a homerun, billion dollar profit potential, it's not going to be developed.
I doubt MCI is actively pursuing SPAM as a business venture. Not unless they believe it's going to generate billions in the next five years. Otherwise, this is a non-story, about MCI making a few pennies because they aren't 100% vigilant.
ShoutingMan.com
To paraphrase an anecdote used as an example in Dickie's book :
Johnson and Johnson's Corporate credo lists J&J's responsibilities in this order 1) to the consumer 2) to the employees 3) to the community 4) to the shareholders (meaning to making money.)
When Tylenol (a J&J product) was tampered with in Chicago, resulting in the deaths of several people, the local police advised J&J that it was an isolated incident, and that a recall was not necessary.
J&J recalled anyway (a $350 million process) and consumers flocked back to Tylenol when it was reintroduced to the market with new tamper proof packaging. Since consumers had proof that J&J cared about them, J&J ended up making money.
The moral of the story is that caring about your consumers may be less profitable in the short run but that in the long run companies that put the consumer first do better. It's obvious to me that MCI does not put the consumer first. Point 4 on the J&J credo is point 1 in MCI's strategy. MCI just lost one customer.
As a former employee of UUNet, whom, in turn, got bought out by Worldcom, which was once and now is again called MCI...*breath*...I can say that my pop.net POP3 account I had when I employee there remained active for at least 4 years after I left in 2000. It only got deleted after I stopped checking it for over a month.
What does this mean? Well, speaking from experience, they don't have nearly as many people monitoring this stuff as they should. So, my guess is that this SPAM abuse is the result of neglect. However, as with most any telecom/IT company, Marketing and Sales drives the business, the techies are beholden to the machinations of the Marketroids and Salesbots. This could be their bright idea.
Yeah - they may inadvertently make $5M from spammers - but I bet the cost of spam to them is a LOT more than that. It follows that this is not an intentional part of their business model - but merely the residue of spammers that they've been unable to eliminate.
www.sjbaker.org
Your problem is someone else feature. SMTP allows things such as anonymous mail which was considered important in emails early days. The real problem is someone sees anonymity as a business venture and the suckers fall for it. If you remove that, then the spamers will just lead longer paper trails which will cost them slightly more but wont stop anything. After all these guys are going out and paying cash for T3 setups fees and monthly fees in advance for a circuit they expect to get a few days use out of. They will be happy to comply with any sill new rules an advanced email system will provide.
X.400 fixed all the problems. You can buy a pateneted solution today that fixes all your email problem but it costs several tens of thousands of dollars per year in license fees alone to run an x.400 system.
They've also had some of the highest fines when it comes to violating the do-not-call list.
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