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MS Gets $7 Million From Spammer
pin_gween writes "Reuters UK reports that Microsoft has settled its spam suit against Scott Richter for $7 million. From the article: 'Microsoft and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer had sued Richter in late 2003, asserting that he had sent, or helped other spammers send, billions of e-mail messages to consumers touting everything from herbal products to loan consolidation schemes.'"
As entrepreneurs go, Richter is scummy and opportunistic, but spammers come a lot worse. Richter at least made an attempt to operate openly and within a feasible interpretation of the law, instead of setting up shop in China and exploiting zombie networks distribute his spam.
From a legal standpoint, this is a nice victory for Microsoft. I hope they achieve their deterrent effect by making the financial incentives to spam more dubious. I'm afraid, though, that they will only succeed in driving hardcore spammers deeper underground, with Richter serving as an example of the dangers of treating your spam operation like a legitimate business.
domain combinatorics
Everyone gets spammed and somehow Microsoft gets $7M. How does that work?
I wonder if email is going the way of usenet. I used to use usenet all the time but gave up when spam destroyed its usefulness for me. Every member of my family has switched to Google Mail because our ISP mail accounts, even with the different services' spam protections and Thunderbird's filtering capabilities suffer from too much spam. It seems as though these lawsuits, which make for a great public relations thing (even I'm proud of MS for doing this), aren't going to make any real diffence.
How does Google filter spam so well or is it just that the service is new?
I still like the idea of publishing spammers home addresses and then sending credit card applications, catalogs and all the rest to their homes. If we could get each of them to receive a couple bushels of junk mail every day at their homes, maybe that would help. I'm against the idea of handing pornography to their children as they play on the playground, but it does seem poetically just.
What can be done to save email or as Google already done it?
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
...did an interview with Richter for a story called "High Volume Email Deployer". You really have to see this to appreciate what a moron Richter is. Not only was he stupid enough to agree to be interviewed by them, he was too stupid to realize they were making a fool of him.
Send people to jail for sending email? C'mon...
No, send them to jail for stealing bandwidth and storage. Send the to jail for harassing people by repeatedly sending the same f***ing ads for Viagra, Cialis, penis enlargement, debt consolidation, etc. Send them to jail for interfering with peoples' businesses. Send them to jail for sending ads for penis enlargement to seven year old girls. And send them to jail for a long time.
I agree that it reeks. Microsoft gets their legal fees paid plus some extra dough for massive free advertising. I wouldn't mind it if the money went into some kind of public trust. But the fact that MS just gets an extra 7Mil means that they are beneficiaries of spam business. That's really more of an encouragement than a deterrent. Now any joe who can make 20 million will get slapped with a lawsuit by MS, MS will get their cut, and the spammer can retire. Great business model. Everybody wins except the people whose mailboxes are choked with Viagra flyers.