MS Speaks Out Against New Zealand's Anti Spam Bill

out_sp0k1n writes "Ryan Hamlin, head of Microsoft's Technology Care and Safety Group spoke out against New Zealand's proposed anti-spam legislation, warning that it could impinge on 'the amazing vehicle of e-mail marketing'. He also suggests that CAN-SPAM has been effective in deterring spammers. From The Article: 'Though often criticized as too meek, US anti-spam legislation - which relies on people opting out of spam - has proved effective in supporting prosecutions and deterring spammers.' Anyone else think that one message doesn't count as spam?"

Comments

FUCK YOU MICRO$OFT!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm tired of your corporate bullshit!

Re:FUCK YOU MICRO$OFT!

[DoorFrame]

That was just a ROCKING first post! Well done!

Re:FUCK YOU MICRO$OFT!

[slughead]

I'm tired of your corporate bullshit!

You can trust corporations... to be corporations.

If anything, M$ speaking out against something in foreign countries is more likely to have the opposite apparently desired effect.

Re:FUCK YOU MICRO$OFT!

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

For once you are right, anti-microsoft troll. Spam is really shitty in how it wastes our most valuable resource: time. Yet Microsoft loves watered-down anti-"spam" bills that are ineffective.

Re:FUCK YOU MICRO$OFT!

[Nintendork]

Re:FUCK YOU MICRO$OFT!
by Anonymous Coward
I'm tired of your corporate bullshit!

Dude, this isn't where you fill out the Microsoft Comment Card. Try going here and sending that message to Ryan Hamlin.

oh, so that's why

[omeomi]

He also suggests that CAN-SPAM has been effective in deterring spammers.

Oh, so that's why I don't get any spam any more...

Well, off to clean my Inbox of spam.

Tom

Re:oh, so that's why

[Tackhead]

> > He also suggests that CAN-SPAM has been effective in deterring spammers.
>
> Oh, so that's why I don't get any spam any more...
>
> Well, off to clean my Inbox of spam.

That's not spam, those are amazing offers to which you just haven't opted out yet! Haven't you listened to Gator, uh, Claria, uh, the new Microsoft Secure Safety Technology that gives you access to the Amazing Vehicle of E-Mail Marketing?

In other news today, Microsoft executives report that dipping your balls in sweet cream and squatting in a kitchen full of kittens may be hazardous to your health.

Re:oh, so that's why

[omeomi]

In other news today, Microsoft executives report that dipping your balls in sweet cream and squatting in a kitchen full of kittens may be hazardous to your health.

Phew. I was just about to do that...good thing you stopped me.

Re:oh, so that's why

[Anonymous Coward]

Until we begin executing spammers on prime time TV, this crap will continue.

Re:oh, so that's why

[WhiteWolf666]

He didn't stop you, Microsoft's Unsolicited Amazing E-mail Advice stopped you.

The bill's in the (e)-mail. We expect payment promptly.

Re:oh, so that's why

[ZX81]

You know the reason for this?

We have elections on at the moment and the government is trying to sweeten the deal. Funny that microsoft got their real intentions found out with this one.

Microsoft should just keep it's mouth shut and maybe it will be more difficult to put it's foot in there.

Re:oh, so that's why

[nastro]

"In other news today, Microsoft executives report that dipping your balls in sweet cream and squatting in a kitchen full of kittens may be hazardous to your health."

Oh, Microsoft! You had me at hello!

Re:oh, so that's why

[mhearne]

The first thing I do when I go online is to check my inboxes for spam. For the past 6 months or so it's been pretty similar - The same old pitches but now in broken, foreign sounding English. If that's due to CANSPAM, then it must be doing some good.

The thing is, that most of the headers seem to originate in the United States. I mark them as junk and destroy them right away to prevent web-bugs, but when they seem to be persistent I'll run a host and whois, and finally make a complaint to the originating ISP.

Not that it does any good. My own ISP, Earthlink, won't even talk to you unless the spam originated on one of their servers.

At least I'm not getting plastered like I was a few years ago. It seems that my address ended up on a CD or something, because I was getting all this Chinese spam that I couldn't even read (hundreds per day).

Not so bad these days, but it's still a distraction that I don't like.

Michael

Re:oh, so that's why

[iced_773]

In other news today, Microsoft executives report that dipping your balls in sweet cream and squatting in a kitchen full of kittens may be hazardous to your health

A little on the serious side, though, cats can't taste sweetness.

Re:oh, so that's why

[BrokenHalo]

The thing is, that most of the headers seem to originate in the United States.

A few years ago (~1997), most of the spam in my inbox used to be largely from .tw and .ru domains. Now, virtually all of it (i.e. >>99%) originates from the US. I don't know whether that implies that Americans are just that much more unscrupulous than the rest of us (*ducks* :-D) but the sheer quantity of it is certainly limiting the usefulness of email.

I no longer bother trying to get spammers' ISPs to take action, since a lot of the junk is obviously sent out by home computers that have been zombied.

Re:oh, so that's why

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news today, Microsoft executives report that dipping your balls in sweet cream and squatting in a kitchen full of kittens may be hazardous to your health.

I don't want to know what led to figuring this out.

Re:oh, so that's why

[Anonymous Coward]

keep it's mouth
put it's foot

"its".

Re:oh, so that's why

[Draknor]

"In other news today, Microsoft executives report that dipping your balls in sweet cream and squatting in a kitchen full of kittens may be hazardous to your health."
---
Oh, Microsoft! You had me at hello!

Wait... Hello Kitty??

Re:oh, so that's why

[Jafar00]

He also suggests that CAN-SPAM has been effective in deterring spammers.
Tell that to my poor, struggling little server with precious resources being gobbled up by the anti-spam and anti-virus capabilities of Amavis, Clam and Spamassassin. That comment smells phishy to me. ;)

Re:oh, so that's why

[GFunk83]

So you didn't want the cheap vasectomy?

Personally, I thought it worked pretty well, though I wish I'd remembered to take morphine before the "procedure."

Re:oh, so that's why

[OMGBBQ]

One corp to rule them all,
One corp to bind them;
One corp to bring them all...
And in the darkness spam them.

(seemed appropriate for N.Z.)

Too meek...

[Nuclear Elephant]

Though often criticized as too meek, US anti-spam legislation - which relies on people opting out of spam - has proved effective in supporting prosecutions and deterring spammers

Well the first draft, which involved a carving knife and a band-aid, would have been more effective.

Good to see

[Kawahee]

It's nice to see normal Asia-Pacific area's being on the cutting edge of spam fighting. And it's nice to see MS recognise NZ.

Re:Good to see

[Citizen Gold]

MS recognized NZ years ago. I've run an MS free zone at home for about 5 years now but before then I'm sure I recall seeing "English (NZ)" as a language option in MS Office...

Re:Good to see

[sanx]

Then how come NZ, like the rest of the English-speaking world, is stuck with English (Yank) as the only option for the GUI. Color, Neighborhood, Favorites, etc etc

That's the idea.

[hungrygrue]

warning that it could impinge on 'the amazing vehicle of e-mail marketing'.

So their warning is basically that it might work?

Re:That's the idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and the spammer^w owner of listbuilder and bcentral doesn't want that. If any readers were dim-witted enough to have taken the comments Gates made about spam last year at face value, it's time to wean yourself off the kool-aid.

What Gates really meant was this;

We want to stamp out spam, we'll do this by rebranding it as legitimate MSSpam and collect a royalty on every message. Please upgrade exchange and start using senderID because it's the only way we could think off to get a wide reaching, royalty generating patent on email.

Of course you don't actually have any choice because Microsoft and it's ESP partners are, at arms length, funding spamming and phishing networks in order to crush the existing SMTP system. It just sucks to be you.

Love,

Bill

PS: if you think our software's bad, wait until you try our penis enlargers

Re:That's the idea.

[Antique Geekmeister]

Worse. They're concerned that it will cut into their profits on selling spam-filters, such as their patented and amazingly stupid SenderID concept, and that it will interfere with the bulk mailing list management tools they sell tightly integrated for use in Microsoft Outlook.

Couple that with their need for your name and personal details with every product registration, and the default settings of those forms to permit them to advertise at you, and we're seeing a company geared up for bulk marketing under the excuse of "customer notices".

Re:That's the idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

In Finland it's illegal to send spam to individuals without their permission. It works, I very rarely get spam from Finnish companies, except to my work address (because spamming companies is legal).

Re:That's the idea.

[Vadim Makarov]

I once had a (dis)pleasure of publicly ridiculing a Norwegian spammer at a local gathering. I think he has changed his business to someting more socially acceptable shortly afterwards.

And I have learned that he is a spammer after having seeing his personal domain on my university's blocklist and asking the sysadmin how in the hell an acquintance of mine got there.

That's how it works in small countries, laws aside.

Microsoft follows the money?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never get how anyone can ever use the argument that some people might "want" spam. If you want to buy something, you can find it on the net. I NEVER want to be inundated with junk adverts.

Mailinator lets me avoid getting spam in the first place. Good luck microsoft.

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[Pig Hogger]

I never get how anyone can ever use the argument that some people might "want" spam. If you want to buy something, you can find it on the net. I NEVER want to be inundated with junk adverts.

Marketer brains are totally out of whack with reality. They operate not only in a different universe, but in a totally orthogonal plane of reality. It is therefore not surprising that they cannot understand nor fathom the motivations of normal people who are sick and tired of advertising being plastered all over the available meatspace.

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[Nasarius]

It is therefore not surprising that they cannot understand nor fathom the motivations of normal people who are sick and tired of advertising being plastered all over the available meatspace.

The cleverer ones do understand this, which is why they're trying to poison word-of-mouth recommendations as well (see: astroturfing).

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[dirk]

People do this all the time. They sign up for something, and then checka bunch of bozes for what they are interested in and would like to get info about. People act like it is impossible that someone would sign up for more information about something. Sure, it oftentimes get sold to someone else and then you get lots of spam, but there is nothing unimaginable about people signing up to get email about products.

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[Haydn Fenton]

Personally, I have a main gmail address, nobody gets this address except friends who I trust. Then I have another gmail address (they're easy to get now, and have huge inboxes) which is set up to automatically forward all mail to my main address. This 'spammy' address is the one I use to register for things and give out to people.

Whenever (although this doesn't happen much tbh) the spammy address starts to get too much SPAM, or I don't want people who know this address contacting me anymore, or whatever, I simply remove the forwarding and sign up for another gmail account. Any important websites which have my old address are updated, any important people are emailed with my new address. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. End of SPAM. No need for anti-spam software, which is great because I'm a cheapskate and on 56k.

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[Sylver Dragon]

I do the same type of thing by having my own mail server. While it's not a solution for everyone (e.g. the parent poster on a 56k connection), it does control spam quite well.
Whenever I give out my email address to a new company, I just create an allias of company_name@my_domain.net If one of those addresses become a source of spam, I simply remove the alias. All of the aliases point to the same inbox, so there is no mess of checking different boxes, and having a client side rule which filters email based on where it came from is easy.

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[hostyle]

1. Make people have to go completely out of their way - perhaps spend money or valuable time - so they don't have to hear about or buy our prodcuct.
2. Go straight to 3.
3. Profit!

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[Freexe]

you do realise that in google if you have the gmail user id no.spam.for.haydn that messages sent to n.o.s.p.a.m.f.o.r.h.a.y.d.n@gmail.com will get to your inbox, in fact you can add dots wherever you like, then if a dot combination gets too much spam you can put a filter on it. This way you don't have to cycle so many accounts.

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[SCVirus]

Then you shouldn't have signed up for all those free porn sites.

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[betadog]

You want spam as soon as it is smart enough to tell you about something that you want to buy (and nothing else). If I'm shopping for a car and someone sends me an email about exactly the car that I want at a good price, I'm happy.

Find away to do this and only this without violating my privacy then I'll want spam.

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[Haydn Fenton]

Oh, cool. I didn't realise that before. I assumed since you could place dots in the email whilst registering, adding dots to your already-existing address means gmail would treat it as a seperate account. Cheers :)

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[Anonymous Coward]

NZ government has a long running habbit of greating vague laws and then throwing them at the courts. This is yet another example of it.

Think about newsgroups, mailing lists, customer newsletters, and anything mass mailed with ligit purposes. Suddenly this is at the mercy of the courts to decide whats legal and whats not. This may not sound a bad thing. But it gives the possiblity under the law to sue the linux mailing list for spamming.

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[Pingla]

Marketing is all about the money. Why is there so much SPAM? Simple, some peoploe buy the products. Had there been no economical gain, there would not have been SPAM. Unfortunately the world is filled with morons and this affects us all. The cost of sending out millions of e-mails is close to none, and the benefits are that their products are sold. SPAM is an excellent tool for marketers.

Re:Microsoft follows the money?

[anthonyon]

Does anyone ever buy anything from SPAM mail? I know I never have and never will. It's like regular traditional JUNK mail, soon as I get it...it's trashed.

Spam is spam

[JesseL]

If it's unsolicited then it's spam. If you give spammers one freebie then they'll just form a new corporation every time they want to send a new batch of crap.

I don't care if they send me 'just one' or a million, either way it is infintley more than I want.

Re:Spam is spam

[TheOtherAgentM]

I see a problem with this thinking, not for most Slashdotters, but the average user doesn't even know what he subscribes to as far as mailing lists go. When I get email I think about where I have bought stuff from recently, to make sure I didn't forget to opt out of something. I give that vendor the benefit of the doubt. Most users out there won't think twice and legitimate operations are going to come under fire. While they may not shut down, the costs to prove they are in the right is a waste of their time. This may effectively raise operating costs of any operation that relies on email to do its marketing.

Re:Spam is spam

[JesseL]

Companies that don't want that hassle can make it very explicit when you sign up for their mailing list. They should make sure that the default option on their web forms is not to subscribe, and their email should be explicit about how you got opted in.

Here's a big clue, IF YOU DON'T MAKE SPAMMING DIFFICULT IT WON'T STOP.

Re:Spam is spam

[JanneM]

If it's unsolicited then it's spam.

Well, if it's uncolicited and it is bulk. I.e. if an unknown person emails me to take contact (after seeing a picture of mine or something, for example) then that's obviously fine. The problem is mass emailings.

What I find amazing is that at least some places restrict it to _commercial_ bulk email. I frankly don't care who is sending the crap, I just want to get rid of it.

Re:Spam is spam

[JesseL]

Point taken.

Hell, I don't even like it when a family member get's ahold of my address and adds it to their inane ('joke of the day'/sappy inspirational message) cc list.

Re:Spam is spam

[Penguin Programmer]

An opt-out system works great if you get one spam a day. However, if you get 100 spam a day, as many of us do, there's no way you're going to actually look at each one, find the opt-out link, and trust that the opt-out link will actually opt you out and not just reveal that someone actually exists at your email address.

The opt-out system works fine for telemarketers because you have to answer the phone or risk missing an important call. For email, I don't have to look at ones I know are spam, so an opt-out system is stupid and useless.

Re:Spam is spam

[aero2600-5]

"When I get email I think about where I have bought stuff from recently, to make sure I didn't forget to opt out of something."

As someone else in this discussion mentioned, time is your most valuable resource. You can't get it back, end of story. Thinking about who you may have forgotten to opt out of takes a bit of time and is, generally speaking, irritating. Remove the thinking and use a website like sneakemail.com and save yourself some time. By creating a new disposable e-mail address every time you create a new account with an online reseller, you remove all the guesswork. You receive a spam, and you know it's from one of two places. A) A mass-mailing using random e-mail addresses, or B) An e-mail sent to you from someone you have given your e-mail address to in the prcoess of doing business. Most spam of the 'A' type are blocked before you even see them. Even Yahoo! has gotten to the point where I only see about one of these a month. The spam of type 'B' will be labeled with the name of who you gave your e-mail address to. You know where the spammer got your e-mail address. The business either sold it, or had it stolen. If you wish to continue doing business with this person, you can contact them about the problem, or you delete the disposable address and never hear from them again.

Personally, I no longer have to deal with spam. Not even my bank has my real e-mail address. Neither does Slashdot for that matter.

Re:Spam is spam

[aero2600-5]

"Hell, I don't even like it when a family member get's ahold of my address and adds it to their inane ('joke of the day'/sappy inspirational message) cc list."

Agreed. I've lost contact with friends after telling them to stop sending me worthless crap because they're too lazy to understand why they may need an e-mail list of people that want to receiver their worthless crap, rather than just sending it to everyone in their address book. I actually send nasty replies now, especially for 'warnings' that almost always a hoax, and usually 3 or 4 years old at that.

Re:Spam is spam

[yRabbit]

That's the problem in the first place.. Operations that rely on email to do their marketing. :(

Re:Spam is spam

[corpsiclex]

i suppose if you're not going to tell ANYONE your email address, you could even get rid of type A; just block incoming mail! oh wait. has the spam defeated the usefulness of email, or have you?

Re:Spam is spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should they change their web sites because of idiots? remember they are out to make a profit and not to force you into some moral high ground. Opt out or quit bitching.

Re:Spam is spam

[zippthorne]

I usually just reply to friends and family with the snopes link to whatever "virus warning" or "bill gates gives $1000 per forward" they send me. Then I chew them out for not removing the two hundred headers and the ten levels of 'forwarding' markers. I actually don't care if a relative wants to forward me the latest joke or what have you as long as they take the time to fix up the formatting a bit so I can read it without getting a headache.

Re:Spam is spam

[ZenShadow]

But if you do make spamming difficult, then there is less spam, which makes the spam that DOES get through increasingly valuable from the sapmmer's perspective. The ones that get through more often can charge more for their services and get a higher response percentage.

Nasty, huh.

--S

Re:Spam is spam

[TeraCo]

That's ass backwards logic if I ever heard it. Surely the system that has spam that we -can't-easily identify should be the one that is opt-in.

Mind you, I have caller id and I just don't answer any calls flagged 'OVERSEAS' so it's all good.

Re:Spam is spam

[EpsCylonB]

You seriously trying to give a reason to defend spam ?.

I dont want emails about viagra and all that shit, I dont care whether other people repsond to them, if they send them to me then that pisses me off.

You just need to make the individuals right to a spam free inbox financially more expensive than the potential rewards of a massive spam offensive.

Re:Spam is spam

[ZenShadow]

You will note that I never said "stop spam" or "don't stop spam" -- I simply pointed out one of the consequences of making less spam "more difficult" to send.

This is as opposed to stopping ALL spam.

In other words, I was pointing out the flaw in the implied argument that making spam difficult WILL make it stop. It won't. It needs to be damn near impossible, not just difficult.

Either that, or find a way to make it so expensive that the ROI simply sucks for spammers.

--S

Re:Spam is spam

[AaronLawrence]

What are you talking about? It's only places you are unsure of (ie. any commercial website) that you give a fake email address to, and those "fake" email addresses go to your normal one, until you need to stop it.

Personal friends or trustworthy organisations can have your real address.

Re:Spam is spam

[UnrepentantHarlequin]

Some numbers to scare yourself to sleep with:

There are roughly 25 million businesses in the US alone. Let's say each of them sent just one spam per year. Let's also assume that your software automatically junks any further mail from someone who has spammed you already. That would be 68,493 emails hitting you per day.

Let's say you could opt out at the rate of one every 5 seconds. That would be 12 per minute, 720 per hour, or 28,800 per 40-hour work week.

Assuming you take a couple of weeks vacation a year, in 50 weeks you can deal with 1,440,000 out of the 25,000,000 spam emails you got this year.

At that rate, it will take you 17.36 years to opt out of just the first year's spam.

But wait! There's more! New businesses open up every year. Just pulling a number out of the air here, let's say that they are established (and send out their annual spam) at a rate of 1 million per year. So by the time you've cleaned out your first year's spam, you have 17,360,000 more to go.

That's another 12 years of opting out ... at the end of which you have 12,055,555 more ... 8.37 more years ... another 5.8 years ... another 4 years ... another 2.8 years ... another 1.9 years ... another 1.35 years ... at the end of which, you're actually caught up.

So, 53 years from the date every business in the USA sent you one single spam, you've finally opted out of all of their lists.

You're still getting new ones, of course, at a rate of 2,740 per day, or 4,000 per working day. The first five and a half hours of every working day -- 70% of your workday -- you spend cleaning that day's spam out of your work email account. When you get home, you spend another 3.8 hours cleaning your home account.

And that's assuming ONLY spam from US-based spammers, and ONLY one from each, and ALL of them honor opt-out instructions (which are, of course, usually just verification of a live address)

53 years to opt out of all of it.

If you start work at age 18, you'll be 71 ... past when most people retire ... by the time you're breaking even on the spam. (and still, remember, opting out for 5.5 hours a day, and 3.8 more at home)

The Yes-You-Can-Spam act was a Bad Thing.

I want to be able to use my emailbox for EMAIL. Not to provide free advertising services for companies I want nothing whatsoever to do with.

Re:Spam is spam

[Scarletdown]

I don't know if you are in the U.S. or not. But if you are, then I would like to point out that the National Do Not Call List: https://www.donotcall.gov/default.aspx actually works.

I registered my phone number back in February, and starting a month later, I have received very few telemarketing calls, perhaps one or two every couple weeks, when I used to get telespammed heavily on an almost daily basis.

Re:Spam is spam

[itchy92]

TO:
RE: GUYS READ!!1 IMPORTANT!!

Just got this and I thought I should warn you!

>> TO: <entire address book>
>> RE: SPAMMERS HARVESTING EMAIL ADDRESSES!
>>
>> ok please everyone i was watching cnn today
>> and they were saying that spammers sometimes
>> take forwarded jokes and warnings and collect
>> the email addresses off of them! for those of
>> you who do not know spammers are not canned
>> meat enthusiasts LOL they are hackers who send
>> out pornographics and viruses through email so
>> please be careful when forwarding emails to
>> your friends and family.
>>
>> Please forward this warning to everyone in
>> your address book.

Re:Spam is spam

[corpsiclex]

my point was the people in this thread are taking it a bit to far - they aren't giving their email to family members, or their banks

can't can spam

[dankelley]

"He also suggests that CAN-SPAM has been effective in deterring spammers"

Yeah, right. And there's this swamp land you might want to buy.

Re:can't can spam

[lrucker]

Yeah, right. And there's this swamp land you might want to buy.

Funny you should mention that. Today's NYTimes has an article about people paying California prices for Florida swampland:

homes in a design proudly called "Cracker Modern" will sit on lots of up to four acres lots near marshes, creeks and conservation areas, ... average $342,900 for the land alone.

Re:can't can spam

[aero2600-5]

"Yeah, right. And there's this swamp land you might want to buy."

Not that I disagree with you about the effectiveness of the CAN-SPAM Act, but Florida, which just so happens to be one giant fucking swamp, is supposedly the second hottest real-estate market in the United States.

Re:can't can spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Alright, who wants to post the Monty Python quote here?

Re:can't can spam

[Foobar of Borg]

>> And there's this swamp land you might want to buy.

It's called DC (built on a swamp). Corporations are doing quite a good job at buying up that particular piece of swampland.

Washington, DC. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany. We must be cautious.

Wait, Wait, Don't Lie To Me

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this a Lie, a Weasel, a Leasel, or *shudder* true?

Credit goes to Al Frankin.

Do Not Call List

[Bullfish]

Gee, the proposed law seems to me to work very much like the do not call list of telemarketing. I.E. Do not call unless you've been asked. That works better than voluntary do not spam lists don't you think?

Re:Do Not Call List

[TheOtherAgentM]

The problem is that much of the spam out there is sent illegally. There is no care for who wants in or not with these guys. Sending from a remote, infected machine takes care of sending from your own server and being identified. So, we don't get mail from mailserver.com, but we get mail from every infected computer on XO's broadband and other ISPs that don't seem to care about the spam out there.

Re:Do Not Call List

[aero2600-5]

" The problem is that much of the spam out there is sent illegally. There is no care for who wants in or not with these guys. Sending from a remote, infected machine takes care of sending from your own server and being identified. So, we don't get mail from mailserver.com, but we get mail from every infected computer on XO's broadband and other ISPs that don't seem to care about the spam out there."

The main reason why spam is so persistent is because they're making money from it, even with the legislation and all the programs designed to counter-act the 'spam problem'. Want to stop spam? Stop their money. Their money comes from the companies that pay the spammers to send out this crap. Punish those companies and the spam will go away. They're easy enough to track. You can identify them just by buying something from one of their shit-mails. They didn't pay the spammers with cash in some back alley. There is a money trail there. Pass legislation that would fine these companies heavily enough that spam is no longer a good idea, financially. They listen to their bottom line. You could even cut them deals in exchange for identifying spammers.

Now, the bigger problem I see is privacy vs. free speech. You have the right to stand in Central Park and shout whatever you like for as long as you like. You can't do anything about the idiots standing on the corner wearing sandwich boards. But spam, and tele-marketing for that matter too, come directly into your home. This is your home we're talking about, the only place where your privacy should be guaranteed. If the idiot with the sandwich board steps on your property, you can call the cops on him. If you're neighbors is making so much noise that it's disturbing you and your other neighbors, you call the cops on him, just the same. Spam reaches you in your home, where privacy prevails over free-speech. You have the right to free-speech in my home, but I can throw your ass out as soon as you start irritating me.

Re:Do Not Call List

[SavvyPlayer]

So why haven't ISPs begun requiring users to "opt in" to port 25? Maybe 1 in 10000 users has a legitimate need to relay email, and 100% of those users would be knowledgeable enough to choose the right setting on their ISPs account configuration page.

Re:Do Not Call List

[Obfuscant]

So why haven't ISPs begun requiring users to "opt in" to port 25? Maybe 1 in 10000 users has a legitimate need to relay email...

It took me a minute to figure out what you were trying to accomplish here. "Opt in to port 25?"

Sorry, wouldn't work. 10000 in 10000 users want the ability to send email, and that is all it takes. Infected systems aren't relaying, they're initiating it.

Re:Do Not Call List

[arbitraryaardvark]

I had signed up for Indiana's do not call list and I thought it was working great - the telemarketers stoped calling. Turns out, so did everyone else - the indiana rules stop people from calling me, even if we have an existing business relationship. So I called to get my name taken off the list, but they refuse to do that. I'm supposed to call the attorney general's office, but it's only open during the day, and i'm a noctural insectivorous mammal, so i keep forgetting to call during the day. Spam is the same sort of deal - a law that outlaws any email doesn't help me; a law that fails to outlaw spam doesn't help much either. Currently gmail catches most if it.

Re:Do Not Call List

[gstoddart]

The problem is that much of the spam out there is sent illegally. There is no care for who wants in or not with these guys. Sending from a remote, infected machine takes care of sending from your own server and being identified.

But that's precisely why CAN SPAM is completly useless in reducing the amount of spam.

If all of the opt-out links are bogus crap for verifying your e-mail (or at least, that's how I treat them) then 'opting out' is completely useless.

They need to start punishing the people whose products are being sold like this.

Hell, half of the spam I get doesn't even appear to be selling anything that I can identify --- it's just crap to fool a bayseian filter.

It's not Law Yet, But M$ Lost

[tonyr60]

The proposed law draft, as it goes forward for consideration, does not reflect Microsoft's requirements. A single unsolicited email from an organisation touting their products will be considered SPAM.

Re:It's not Law Yet, But M$ Lost

[KiltedKnight]

So then when you purchase something, you'd have to "opt in" to a mailing list... meaning, if you check the box, fill in an e-mail address on a registration card for something other than warranty purposes, they can send you anything they like.

Sale of their list(s) to other companies would be illegal unless you "opt in."

"Unsolicited" e-mails about your product and possible defects do not count, as you expect the company to notify you of recalls, usability issues, etc.

I, like an earlier poster, can't imagine anyone wanting to opt in. That's probably why a lot of the stuff coming out of US-based companies tell you to "uncheck here if you do not wish to receive...." It's how they capture those who don't pay attention.

Re:It's not Law Yet, But M$ Lost

[Anonymous Coward]

...SPAM® (all capital letters) refers to SPAM® brand luncheon meat. While, "spam" (all lower case letters) refers to Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE). is a registered trademark of Hormel Foods for their fine luncheon meat.

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~trw/spam/>

Impinging for fun and profit!

[Lord_Slepnir]

warning that it could impinge on 'the amazing vehicle of e-mail marketing'.

What follows is my train of thought:

Impinge? Are they making things up now?

Correction: Impinge is a cromulent word.

Baring the sarcasm, I'm also concerned that laws outlawing murder will impinge (I'm learning new vocab!) on the amazing industry of selective human elimination services.

Re:Impinging for fun and profit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a dictionary. Not their fault that you don't know English.

Re:Impinging for fun and profit!

[slavemowgli]

Words like these embiggen even the smallest article. :)

Re:Impinging for fun and profit!

[Tony Hoyle]

Impinge is a perfectly normal english word...

Google afrees

It's not cromulent at all.

Re:Impinging for fun and profit!

[joe_bruin]

Impinge? Are they making things up now?

No, you are simply ignorant.

impinge Pronunciation Key (m-pnj)
v. impinged, impinging, impinges
v. intr.

• 1. To collide or strike: Sound waves impinge on the eardrum.
  
• 2. To encroach; trespass: Do not impinge on my privacy.
  

Re:Impinging for fun and profit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Corrections: Impinge is a word. It's 'barring,' not 'baring.' That's not what sarcasm is. Quoting the Simpsons doesn't make you funny.

Re:Impinging for fun and profit!

[Anonymous Coward]

    Selective Human Selection ! (SHS)

    Poor ol' Darwin.

    Come to think of it, anyhing involving greed, i mean, money, is. Same'ol...

Just Curious...

[bobsacks]

Has anyone on here actually ever bought anything from one of these mass market emails? I myself haven't, and I don't know anyone off hand who has. What I wonder is how they stay in business. Money has to be coming in from somewhere.

Re:Just Curious...

[Red Flayer]

Has anyone on here actually ever bought anything from one of these mass market emails? ...What I wonder is how they stay in business. Money has to be coming in from somewhere."

How many do you think they have to sell to be profitable?

Spam is virtually free to send, and their overhead is practically nil.

Sure, there's only a small chance that someone might buy their product... but I bet they'll be able to sell their list of valid addresses to spammers that have 'real' products, such as marketing surveys, etc.

Re:Just Curious...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure! First of all, I got rich thanks to a favour I did to a certain nigerian guy.

Besides, herbal penis enlargement pills worked (too) well [sorry, Rocco]. I still don't need the Viagra stuff but I'm sure it will be a nice investment.

Spam is Qt, man!

Re:Just Curious...

[Anonymous Coward]

There has to be an overhead to creating and maintaining the botnets spammers use. From paying the virus writers to taking precautions to avoid getting caught (secure telephones and such) to the time taken to craft a virus and release it without getting caught there is going to be an overhead in time as well as money.

Re:Just Curious...

[aero2600-5]

"Has anyone on here actually ever bought anything from one of these mass market emails? I myself haven't, and I don't know anyone off hand who has. What I wonder is how they stay in business. Money has to be coming in from somewhere."

Now, I don't like to make comments about the intelligence of the Slashdot crowd, as some of them can appear to be pretty stupid at times, all in all, they're smarter than the average e-mail recipient. The Slashdot crowd is, amazingly enough, too smart to click on shit-mail. Unfortunately, even with it's huge following, the Slashdot crowd is only a small fraction of the e-mail recipients. It's these other people that don't know any better. I'm making up numbers here, but for every 1 million shit-mails sent out, 10 people buy something. Until you educate these people to not buy this crap through shit-mail and just search the internet for it, they will continue to click on shit-mail. Besides education, there are only two other options. Remove the shit-mail, or remove the idiots clicking on the shit-mail.

You must be at least 10% smarter than this equipment in order to use it safely.

Re:Just Curious...

[Anonymous Coward]

My arabic teacher fell for one of those email scams. She was hard up for money and was emailed about one of those schemes that claim that you can make money by reading webpages, ads, or something like that. She ended up only losing around $25-30 USD, but it was enough to cause her some minor financial ache. I would assume that the people like her, that are innocent and not technologically aware, are the ones that fall for the majority of this kida crap.

CAN-SPAM effective?

[Elias Ross]

Can anybody point to any research (or, frankly pundit or blogger) that has concluded that CAN-SPAM has had any effect at all? So far, it sounds like CAN-SPAM has bene "toothless", made "zero impact", etc.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[javaxman]

So far, it sounds like CAN-SPAM has bene "toothless", made "zero impact", etc.

Are you sure it hasn't actually "made the problem worse" by giving spam an air of legitimacy?

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[MTTECHYBOY]

I don't know - the only effect I have seen is a INCREASE in SPAM - but, maybe that is really what the 'bought and paid for' Senators and Congressmen intended...

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[oliverthered]

giving spam an air of legitimacy
And TV, Billboard, Radio , Film and Hommy Tilfiger Logos on cloths don't have exactly the same effect?

I'm not saying I support spam, just that spam is another form of advertising. If other forms of advertising come unsolicited from companies.
Why is spam any worse than someone wearing a krappa t-shirt, drinking a can of Koke and eating a MukDonalds, why is spam any worse than traditional junk mail?

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[georgewad]

because YOU pay for the bandwidth they THEY use to market to you.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[phalanx]

Because I pay for the space in my Email Box the spammer doesn't. All of these others don't cost me anything to witness in a public place. This is the reason telemarketers shouldn't call a cell phone before the DO NOT CALL list was started.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[Vancorps]

Perhaps because I don't receive truck loads of junk mail at my house much to the enjoyment of my postal carrier.

I filter spam for my entire organization, we get about 30,000 emails a day and about 25,000 of them are spam. Imagine receiving 25,000 coupons in your mail everyday, and ten times that twice a year.

I agree with what I believe was your underlying point in that advertising in all forms has gotten way out of control. I would be curious about measuring the average television show to commericial ratio in minutes 20 years ago as compared to now. Considering 1/3rd of the Simpsons is typically commercials I'd think its safe to say thats quite a bit more than in the past.

Of course if thats not what you were saying I apologize.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[oliverthered]

I pay advertising costs whenever I buy a product, and the use of Krapple Mac's and other obvious product placements often spoils the whole file for which I've payed a good £6 ($8.5) to see. Flashing and changing bill boards also waste my time, and time is money, so really there's little cost difference between spam and other ads.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[oliverthered]

Considering 1/3rd of the Simpsons is typically commercials I'd think its safe to say thats quite a bit more than in the past.

and that 1/3 costs you, when you buy a product from the advertiser you pay for the add, and when you watch TV it takes up your time and time is also money. Spam costs me a negligible amount of money and hardly any time at all.

Maybe all companies should be charged (taxed) for data and advertising stopping spam from being so profitable and stopping companies from readily exchanging data about people.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[Vancorps]

I tend to think you just outlaw the sale for mailing lists in general. Then the whole drive for this crap goes away. If I am a customer of one company then in no way would I want any other company to be mailing me anything. The whole idea seems absurd to me.

Of course if I am a customer of the company then they have a legitimate reason to be able to contact me although for obvious reasons a simple banning of the sale of mailing lists will not solve everything. I could see companies with large customer bases selling their services as mailers.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[DavidTC]

Spam costs you 'nothing' because you are unknowingly funding filtering and blocking of spam.

I think we should turn off the spam filtering of all people who think spam isn't a big deal.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[oliverthered]

It's not just 'mailing list' anymore, for instance Experian sell more demographic and other data than you could possibly imagine and stores like WallMart and Tesco hold and sell a huge amount of information often about individual people.
That data is readily sold to advertisers (and anyone else who wants it) and it more-or-less works out as a tax being charged by the data providers that ends up costing the customer in a nnumber of ways mostly relating to freedom of choice.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[oliverthered]

Spam costs you 'nothing' because you are unknowingly funding filtering and blocking of spam.

Spam costs me 'nothing' because I register to a million and one mailing lists that I have to filter through anyway, the extra bit of filtering for spam is negligible, I also have a private email address that I give to very few people so I can always get to my important email without any excess cost. This was also the case when I was running my own private mail server without any filtering (except possibly my ISP blocking a few IP addresses from it's network)

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[aero2600-5]

"giving spam an air of legitimacy
And TV, Billboard, Radio , Film and Hommy Tilfiger Logos on cloths don't have exactly the same effect?

I'm not saying I support spam, just that spam is another form of advertising. If other forms of advertising come unsolicited from companies. Why is spam any worse than someone wearing a krappa t-shirt, drinking a can of Koke and eating a MukDonalds, why is spam any worse than traditional junk mail?"

Fundamentally, spam is the same as junk mail. It intrudes upon your personal space and requires you to take the time to discard it. Logo's on t-shirts and billboards are not the same. It only takes an instant to move your eyes away from it, and it need not come into your home.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[oliverthered]

Logo's on t-shirts and billboards are not the same. It only takes an instant to move your eyes away from it.....

They must be using models from the ugly tree corp of America in your area then either that or their not your type. Personally being distracted in the the first place is the annoying thing not how long it takes me to look away.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[aero2600-5]

"They must be using models from the ugly tree corp of America in your area then either that or their not your type. Personally being distracted in the the first place is the annoying thing not how long it takes me to look away."

Actually, I live less than a block away from the headquarters of Venus Swimwear. They use the most impressive models I have ever seen on a billboard, but I'm only distracted 4 times a year when they change the billboard for the new season, even though I drive by it everyday.

Amusingly enough, the winter billboard still sports a woman in a bikini.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[oliverthered]

I suppose living right next to them and it all becomes too familia, I only get to see things billboards like that a few times a year in increadable density and their very anoying. (thankfully the t-shirt adds 'pop up' a little more often)

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[Ponzicar]

Spam is worse than junk mail. With junk mail, it's the companies who have to pay for the paper, envelope, and postage. The more letters they send, the more money they have to pay. Plus they all clearly identify who sent it. The usps also is able to oversee the entire system (in the usa at least). With spam, there is no material cost or postage. It costs just as much to send 100 emails as 1,000,000. there is anonymity; spoofed addresses, spam zombies, and open relays make covering one's tracks child's play. In addition, there's nobody you can complain to.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[Maestro4k]

I'm not saying I support spam, just that spam is another form of advertising. If other forms of advertising come unsolicited from companies. Why is spam any worse than someone wearing a krappa t-shirt, drinking a can of Koke and eating a MukDonalds, why is spam any worse than traditional junk mail? Traditional junk mail isn't slipped into your house through any small crevace the marketers can find that a letter will fit through for one thing. For another you don't receive junk mail that pretends to be from a different company/person. You also don't get returned mail sent out by some junk mailer using your return address.

Starting to get the picture? If you haven't yet then please allow me to forward you the 40+ false bounces I get a day where spammers have used an E-mail address I have. I have the strange misfortune of having a last name that's a common english word (but not as common for a name) and I had been in the habit of getting my E-mail addresses to be lastname@domain long before spam became a problem. Thanks to the spammers I've had to move away from my preferred E-mail usernames to avoid both dictionary attack spam and bounces. The account I mentioned is with Comcast and up until a year ago it only got a few spams a month. Nothing changed on my end, I have other accounts I use to sign up for things (actually I just use Spam Gourmet) and only a very few family and friends had that address. About a year ago the level of spam jumped up a bit but what really made the account useless was the sudden influx of bounced spam messages that pretended to be from MY account.

I no longer use that Comcast account but I do download and delete the mail in it periodically. It's up to over 40 false bounces and "my mailbox is protected by _____ and you need to do ____ to prove you're not a spammer" messages. The amount of spam is much lower, about 20 a week and the Baysian filter catches most of it.

An interesting side effect is that I can see that sending bounces for E-mails flagged as spam only makes the problem worse. Most of the bounces are from mail servers saying "sorry your message was flagged as spam and not delivered". Well hell, if you think it's spam then why send a bounce? If it was just the spam it would be manageable but it's all the bounces that have made the account unusable.

In any case spam is much, much different than other form of advertising. Other forms of advertising don't hijack resources and try to do whatever sneaky, scummy things possible to make you see them. Frankly the actions spammers take to send out their spam tell you all you need to know. Do you know of any legit company that uses hijacked zombie PCs, open proxies, etc. to send out their advertising? Spammers do. They know their messages are unwanted, perhaps even illegal but they don't give a shit. Hell they even advertise false and illegal products!

How anyone could think it's "just" another form of advertising is beyond me. Perhaps marketers act like spammers where you are?

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[aero2600-5]

"Spam is worse than junk mail. With junk mail, it's the companies who have to pay for the paper, envelope, and postage. The more letters they send, the more money they have to pay. Plus they all clearly identify who sent it. The usps also is able to oversee the entire system (in the usa at least). With spam, there is no material cost or postage. It costs just as much to send 100 emails as 1,000,000. there is anonymity; spoofed addresses, spam zombies, and open relays make covering one's tracks child's play. In addition, there's nobody you can complain to.

I agree with you that spam is worse than junk mail because of the costs involved, but it's still in the same category. Yes, they are partially anonymous, as you can't tell who sent you what. But there is an easy, although more involved, way to find out who is sending the e-mails. The spam is advertising products and providing a link to a website to purchase said crap. You can't sell things anonymously very easily. You identify the seller of the crap, err.. goods. You make it illegal for them to support spammers with legislation or prosecute them for obstruction of justice should they refuse to identify who they paid to send out the spam. These people did not transfer money by slipping someone a wad of cash in a showbar. There's a trail of transactions to follow. If these sellers are using illegal means to transfer money to the spammers, then it's just more weight to use against them to make them cooperate. You don't have to threaten them with jail time, just fine them so hard that it is, financially, a poor business choice.

Anyone seen the newest cop show on TV, Wanted? It's a great show, but I predict the next new cop show will be all about hunting down spammers. Maybe I can sell that idea to Dick Wolf.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[oliverthered]

Thanks to the spammers I've had to move away from my preferred E-mail usernames to avoid both dictionary attack spam and bounces.

This is probaby good for you and everyone else with your sirname too, I have an odd sirname but it's not odd enough that I can always use my sirname as a login and everyone knows don't use a dictionary word for anything you want to be secure, don't they?

bounced spam messages that pretended to be from MY account.

Do you run Windows? do you or have you ever have a bot using your email address, do friends that you have given you email address to run Windows? Security holes in Windows + baggage may be part of your problem.

Do you know of any legit company that uses hijacked zombie PCs, open proxies, etc. to send out their advertising? Spammers do.

I don't run Windows and I live behind a firewall so it's never been an issue, I surprised all those zombies are still running Windows.

Your lucky if you only get spam, some of the junk mail posted through my door uses a composite material that doesn't compost or recycle well so it ends up taking up REAL WORLD space in land-fill !!FOREVER!! (well almost).

Well, if you run Windows then your going to get all kinds of problems, spammers being just one of them. I don't think the NZ law WON'T DO ANYTHING TO STOP ZOMBIES since in most countries it is already illegal to take over someones PC without their conscent, I suppose it's the graffiti of the advertising world. 'legitimate' spam is still pretty much the same as other advertising mediums.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[oliverthered]

With junk mail, it's the companies who have to pay for the paper, envelope, and postage. ..and I have to pay for landfill, recycling or some other expensive way of disposing of this crap. I bet you landfill costs in real terms more than a few emails in you inbox.

If I could get away with it I would take some rubbish from my big (old fish heads are good) and posy them through the box of the people posting crap through my door.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[eyeye]

Spam costs me a negligible amount of money and hardly any time at all.

You sound like someone who hasnt yet had his main email address harvested by spammers and takes a "it doesnt affect me so why are you all whining" attitude.

Your time will come :-)

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[Vancorps]

This I know, and this I think should be outlawed. I give my credit card company access to some information. I don't want them selling that information to 3rd parties. Yes there are regulations in place in regards to that but thats obviously not enough.

Mainly there is a simple law on the books. When I give my information to a company it is my information they are "licensing." This has been the case for 20 years. They don't own the information about me, I do. With that being the case I should think that they require my express consent to share that information, and if they are making money on it you bet I want a piece of the pie.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[Maestro4k]

This is probaby good for you and everyone else with your sirname too, I have an odd sirname but it's not odd enough that I can always use my sirname as a login and everyone knows don't use a dictionary word for anything you want to be secure, don't they? You're ignoring the fact that I'm having to change my preferred E-mail username, the usage of which predates spamming, because of the spammers. And as far as using a dictionary word being insecure, yes it is if you use it for a password. Using a dictionary word for a username isn't a security problem as long as you have strong passwords.

Do you run Windows? do you or have you ever have a bot using your email address, do friends that you have given you email address to run Windows? Security holes in Windows + baggage may be part of your problem.

Well now, that's a rather unrealistic viewpoint you have there. I use both Windows and Linux at home, the few friends and family that knew that address are also a mixture. None of us have ever been infected with a bot/virus/etc. Security holes in any OS isn't part of the problem here, at least as far as my address being used. I'm sure there are plenty of compromised systems, both Windows _and_ Linux, out there that the spam's being shoved through that causes the bounces but that's not anything I can control.

I don't run Windows and I live behind a firewall so it's never been an issue, I surprised all those zombies are still running Windows.

I'm behind a firewall/NAT router and also use software firewalls on all my systems (both Windows & Linux). All of them are kept patched, have antivirus software on them, etc. I've had not a single infection/infestation of virii/worms/adware/spyware/malware. Also not all zombie PCs are running Windows, there are machines running Linux/*BSD/*NIX as well. The majority seem to be Windows machines but they aren't the sole problem. Unsecured machines running any OS will become spam conduits. Spammers will try shoving E-mails through any scripts they can find on websites, hoping they might find a way to break them and get spam through. I just had some asshole try to send spam through the Shoutbox code on my blog. There's no way it COULD send E-mail but this didn't stop them from hitting it multiple times from 5-6 different IPs trying various methods.

Your lucky if you only get spam, some of the junk mail posted through my door uses a composite material that doesn't compost or recycle well so it ends up taking up REAL WORLD space in land-fill !!FOREVER!! (well almost).

I don't get any junk mail that can't be recycled. I may shred it if it's a credit card offer with my name/address on it but I take all of it to a recycling center along with magazines I've finished reading, plastics, etc. I don't even have to deal with the recycling part since it's handled by the recycling center. I've also yet to receive a single piece of bounced junk mail that pretended to be from my address.

Well, if you run Windows then your going to get all kinds of problems, spammers being just one of them.

Actually I don't have any problems at all with my Windows machines or my Linux machines. Windows, especially XP, is quite stable if properly setup and secured. Windows isn't the problem, the spammers are the problem.

I don't think the NZ law WON'T DO ANYTHING TO STOP ZOMBIES since in most countries it is already illegal to take over someones PC without their conscent, I suppose it's the graffiti of the advertising world.

I find it quite odd that you assume that the problem has to be my fault because I run a certain OS and criticize me for it then admit that it's illegal to take over someone's PC without consent in most countries. You're not being consistant here, even if I my machine had been compromised and that was what was resulting in my getting so many fake bounces it's STILL the fault of scummy spammers using dictionary attacks, false retur

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[oliverthered]

I find it quite odd that you assume that the problem has to be my fault because I run a certain OS and criticize me for it then admit that it's illegal to take over someones PC without consent in most countries.

Well, you problem appeared to be a compromised email (emails being sent with you email address but not by you), if you email address isn't public then it's been taken from a zombie PC that has your email address on it, this isn't just the fault of the OS but people who run a certain OS that's well known for having security problems don't seem to be any good at keeping up with updates.

I don't see you complaining that you have to lock your doors and don't just have to press a button to start your car. People are always going to take you for a ride if possible and you have to be astute if you don't want to be, maybe that means not using a common word for your email address, maybe that means making sure you OS is up to data and secured and not a zombie.

By definition spam isn't legitimate.

Well, it depends on who's definition you use, but generally spam seems to be defined as unsolicited bulk email (the electronic equivalent of paper junk mail) and as far as I'm concerned it's no less legitimate than any other form of advertising, and I do know people who like the unsolicited bulk snail-mail that pops through the door so I'm sure someone somewhere likes spam.

Frankly if you're not a spammed I suspect you benefit from it in some manner or you wouldn't be doing this.
equivalent of paper junk mail
No, I'm able to see spamming from a critical point of view, next to no-one on /. would support spam, infact it's almost pointless having a discussion about it. So I thought I'd take the point of view of someone who uses spam for advertising within the law (no zombies etc...) and ask why spam should be treated differently than any other form of advertising, kind of a devils advocate.

The only two responses I seem to have had is that it costs the received more than the sender, they stole my email address and now it gets bounced around by zombies.

The second problem is already against the law and more legislation probably won't help, and the first problem can be solved relatively effectively by taxing spam.

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

My dictionary does not contain the term 'big' used as a noun, nor the verb 'posy'. There seems to be some sort of new vocabulary developing on Slashdot recently, or did I miss the memo about the transition to Newspeak?

Re:CAN-SPAM effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

posy is a brief political statement.

What's up with his title?

[Nuclear Elephant]

Ryan Hamlin, head of Microsoft's Technology Care and Safety Group

Is it just me or does his title sound like the Microsoft equivalent of an airline stewardess? And how come everyone we hear from Microsoft is the head of something? Were they all promised head to come work at Microsoft?

Re:What's up with his title?

[Maax]

The Departments of Truth, Peace and Love would have been just too much of a give away.

Re:What's up with his title?

[Nuclear Elephant]

The Departments of Truth, Peace and Love would have been just too much of a give away.

It would not surprise me if somewhere at Microsoft there were a head of the "department of homepage security".

Re:What's up with his title?

[Anonymous Coward]

A random search on Google found this amusing website:

http://www.idleworm.com/nws/2004/fngr1.shtml

"The Department of Homepage Security in cooperation with Microsoft, has developed a method to fingerprint people using their monitors."...

Silly, but amusing.

Re:What's up with his title?

[WillyMF1]

Were they all promised head to come work at Microsoft?

Hire me!!! Hire me!!!
oh wait. You just mean a job title. Never mind.

Re:What's up with his title?

[burndive]

I think they prefer the term 'flight attendant.'

Re:What's up with his title?

[Anonymous Coward]

The title Head of the Department of Rape and Pillage was already taken.

Re:What's up with his title?

[QuantaStarFire]

Were they all promised head to come work at Microsoft?

Of course not. Only those working on the Red Light project were promised head, and that's strictly under the table if you catch my drift. ;)

Re:What's up with his title?

[edunbar93]

No, it sounds much much more like the "Ministry of Love."

That's how I read it.

[Swamii]

Ryan Longfellow, head of Bigandlong's Technology Care and Safety Survey spoke out against New Rolex's proposed anti-spam legislation, warning that it could imflate on 'the amazing effects of Viagra'.

He also suggests that his product has been effective in enlarging members from 100% to 200%.

From The Article: 'Though often criticized as too meek, click here for a free IPod - which relies on people starting their own home business - has proved effective in supporting the former great king of Nimbabwatsu' through verification of you PayPal account.

Re:That's how I read it.

[uptoeleven]

yes but there'll be a patch for it based on a new dns field called the c-alias.

(reads rfc again)

no that said cialis...

Also can anyone tell me - these spams go on about soft tabs. Is that like a tab that only sometimes line wraps?

So I wont' be receiving XP patches by mail again?

[CapnGrunge]

Opt-in or out are crap anyway, but opt-in doesn't have the catch of unsubscribing.

Wonderful Spam

[Doc Ruby]

When Microsoft gets CAN-SPAM, instead of the people of a country getting real spam protection, Microsoft gets to sue spammers on behalf of their customers for damages. Even after getting revenue from spammers, and selling antispamware that doesn't work so good. And buying Gator, the infamous spammer. Microsoft doesn't want the government protecting you or your privacy from spammers. Because Microsoft takes on the job, privatizing privacy, they get paid every which way. And we get spam out our pieholes.

Translation: If MSFT doesn't make money on it

[WillAffleckUW]

We won't support it.

The "support" services sector to "stop spam" is very lucrative, just as the "anti-piracy" services sector to "stop virii and worms" is very lucrative.

If someone did something about spam, people might not buy the planned Microsoft Anti-Spyware product that's in beta now, when they'll be made to pay for it on release.

And thus, MSFT can't support a bill that might harm their market share.

Sigh.

Re:Translation: If MSFT doesn't make money on it

[slavemowgli]

When you think about it, this story, and the fact that it is considered news, is actually rather funny - or disturbing, depending on how you look at it.

Why does it matter what M$ thinks about a proposed new anti-spam bill - or any bill, for that matter? Shouldn't the only thing that matters be what the *people* of New Zealand think?

Re:Translation: If MSFT doesn't make money on it

[D4C5CE]

Why does it matter what M$ thinks about a proposed new anti-spam bill - or any bill, for that matter?
Shouldn't the only thing that matters be what the people of New Zealand think?

Just ask e.g. the peoples of Denmark, Poland and the Netherlands.

It's actually just disturbing, or sad - (except for utter sarcasm) there is no fun in these affairs whatsoever.

Re:Translation: If MSFT doesn't make money on it

[ultracool]

I live in New Zealand and I'm glad they said no to M$. I'm glad that every so often, the government does *something* sensible. We seem to have a good history of saying no to things from the US...

Re:Translation: If MSFT doesn't make money on it

[ToxicBanjo]

The "support" services sector to "stop spam" is very lucrative, just as the "anti-piracy" services sector to "stop virii and worms" is very lucrative.
Makes you wonder if any of these companies are creating the disease so they can sell us the cure (be it anti virus/spam/spyware). Its one way (albeit unscrupulous) to maintain your market stability and bottomline.
I mean its not as far fetched as one might have thought before the Gator purchase.

No

[mnemonic_]

FIND THEM AND DESTROY THEM!

In other news, Microsoft sues 235 spammers

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, Left Hand continues to disclaim all knowledge of rumors of the existence of so-called "Right Hand"

Re:In other news, Microsoft sues 235 spammers

[FragHARD]

Well it's pretty obvious what m$ wants... they see all that lovely money going into the hands of someone other than themselves namely the spammers. Why else wouldn't they want to get rid of spam? because if they eliminate spam then they cannot profit from it!

As a kiwi

[simonharvey]

As a New Zealander I am surprised that the government is showing this much common sense:

"Mr Cunliffe says Microsoft's proposed "opt out" approach is too weak and has been rejected.
"We decided it's going to be opt-in. End of story. Why should you have to opt out of spam?"

And that common sense is prevailing over US law.
*duck*

Simon

Re:As a kiwi

[The Angry Mick]

And that common sense is prevailing over US law.

The U.S. government doesn't really lack common sense; just backbone.

For a lot of elected officials its a question of who can pay more for their services, the average Joe, or corporate America?

Re:As a kiwi

[St0rmward3n]

I second that :) As a New Zealander I'd love to see this bill come into effect.

Re:As a kiwi

[gavinjolly]

I am another Kiwi supporting this bill. And I am suprised the bill is sensible from a users point of view.

Re:As a kiwi

[Stonehand]

I wonder how much of an effect it'd have, 'tho.

I get roughly two hundred spam a day -- that's from having the same address blithely public for over a decade. I've gotten spam in English, Korean (LOTS of it), Chinese (probably; LOTS of it), some Cyrillic-based language (in particular, there's some idiot who's occasionally sent me 100+ copies of the same Cyrillic e-mail in a row), Hebrew, German, and Spanish. Possibly other languages as well.

Off-hand, I don't remember any of it being routed through New Zealand. It's never really been on the radar AFAICT.

Now, if South Korea regularly executed people who spammed from there, it'd make a dent.

Re:As a kiwi

[Anonymous Coward]

Gravity - Still a theory just dont tell its religious zealouts, the Gravityians.

Re:As a kiwi

[Anonymous Coward]

And that common sense is prevailing over US law.

Quiet! The US is looking for a pretext to invade some other countries as well...

BTW, you wouldn't happen to have any oil there, would you?

Re:As a kiwi

[Darkling-MHCN]

I don't see the contraversy here. This is the same as passed in Australian legislation and has been working fine for a couple of years now. Opt in is the right approach.

How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Here's one very basic, very common problem anti-spam legislation doesn't solve.

1) Someone registers your email at ACME's web site.
2) ACME wants to know if you are legit or not, so they send you a "please click on this link if you really requested this" email.
3) You didn't request email from ACME, but now you have an "are you you?" email from ACME.

Is the "please click on this link" email spam?

If so, what should ACME do to verify you are you instead?

If not, what's to stop a spammer from sending their advert along with the "click to confirm" email? (I know, they already do.)

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[TheOtherAgentM]

That's an excellent point. What if I mail the wrong person accidentally? Sure, I am not going to get convicted of anything, but think about the time if someone wants me investigated. It's not just my time and resources, but the time and resources to look into it.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't allow anything outside the "this is an e-mail verifying that you agreed to sign up to receive emails from ". if there is other content in there, e.g. saying

"We are checking that you want to receive e-mail from , about their super product . For more info on , click here"

would be spam.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[JanneM]

If so, what should ACME do to verify you are you instead?

I rather believe that is ACME's problem if their opt-in method doesn't in fact work. "I couldn't figure out a way to do what I wanted legally" is generally not seen as an excellent defense.

How about ACME do not send promotional email until they have solved this?

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

How about ACME do not send promotional email until they have solved this? I never said "promotional email"...try bending your mind around something like the "confirm your email" your favorite nerd sites (Slashdot included) send...

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

That sounds like an RFC just begging to be written...

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[Pig Hogger]

If so, what should ACME do to verify you are you instead?

They don't. They can't. That's precisely the idea: stop spamming dead on it's tracks. Once companies will be able to legally send a "first post" to anyone at all without prior approval, the slightest smidgeon of spamming will be illegal, and therefore prosecutable.

The idea is to make companies scared to death of the concept of using e-mail for advertising.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"The idea is to make companies scared to death of the concept of using e-mail for advertising."

Ah yes, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" strikes again.

How, pray tell, do you suggest someone grant "prior approval"?

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[jonfelder]

If not, what's to stop a spammer from sending their advert along with the "click to confirm" email? (I know, they already do.)

Having an ad would define it as SPAM.

In my opinion, tt should be be ok to send confirmation emails. However, the legislation should specify that the email contain no ads, is limited to one per registration request, and include an opt-out from any future registration requests.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[Vancorps]

I recently ran into this issue with our mailing list which consists of about 55,000 people. This list is 100% opt-in but regardless, someone didn't like us, so they submitted spamcops trap email address to our list. We included them in our email blast and naturally received a complaint.

When I followed up with SpamCop they weren't helpful at all, they would not tell me why it happened, who was involved or how I could stop it from happening again. They just labeled my company as one that bought an email list and said to hell with us.

Naturally this wasn't acceptable to me so I moved to their parent company where I actually got some help. I explained to them exactly how we got the email addresses we used and that we understood there was some abuse of the system, so we asked them how to proceed without making the problem worse.

The solution was to send out an email blast asking everyone to confirm their wish to be on the list. This would be the only thing we were allowed to ask in the email. No advertising, not even any logos, just a simple plain email with a link to our website. Yes this shrunk our list a little bit but the majority of people on it were customers of ours and wanted to be there.

So yes, if I had mod points I'd mod you up. Its very important not promoting any products. That is the difference between spam and legitimate messaging.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[Dachannien]

If it doesn't advertise something, then it's not really spam. So, if it's a subscription or account creation verification e-mail that doesn't include ads, and it's sent in good faith (meaning that somebody did put your e-mail address in their form, whether it was you or not, and they are actually and honestly trying to verify that you wanted an account or subscription), then nothing's wrong.

If, on the other hand, they include advertisements or send e-mails claiming to be verification e-mails but that are really just mass e-mails to bulk address lists to surreptitiously advertise their website, then it's spam.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[Pig Hogger]

You don't. Period.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[JanneM]

I never said "promotional email"...try bending your mind around something like the "confirm your email" your favorite nerd sites (Slashdot included) send...

Once again: if their system for collecting and confirming email is open for abuse it is their problem to come up with a different system. If confirming emails are open to abuse they should cease collecting until they find a way to stop it.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

simple idiot - you send a second apologetic email and that's the end of it. As long as you didn't advertise, and it was just a registration email - what's the problem.

Those 2 emails aren't spam - their confirmation emails.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I have yet to see a "system for collecting and confirming email" that isn't ripe for abuse, unless you introduce something like PGP or S/MIME where part of submitting your request is submitting your key/cert. However, even people I know who are fanatic about including their PGP key or public S/MIME cert in every outbound email are still leary about turning off the ability to accept non-signed emails on their clients. In other words, this isn't a perfect solution given today's tech either.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I'm trying to figure out if you're kidding or not, but I'll assume your are not. You just said that ACME needs prior approval to send you email. Then you said that ACME has no way of getting prior approval. I think your solution may be to swear off email; under those conditions, there is no way for anyone to send anyone else email...

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[JanneM]

Not my problem.

If you can't make your customer email contact system safe from systematic abuse, then use a different means of communicating with your customers. Call them, use carrier pigeons, whatever.

Now, confirmation emails sure are borderline cases. _If_ they truly are sent only in response to an individual (checked with captchas or something); and _if_ the confirmation mail really only is confirmation with no advertisement or promotion; and _if_ the confirmation is really, truly, fully opt-in (until I answer that email in a clear affirmative you will not send or contact me ever again), then the very occasional harassment/abuse from a third party is probably my problem and the company's problem in equal amount.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[Registered Coward v2]

Here's one very basic, very common problem anti-spam legislation doesn't solve.

Here's another:

Someone does a Joe-job on you - and you get a bunch of unsolicated emails in response - and chose to complain to each person's ISP. Now, the ISP probably would realize what had happened, but it still takes time to do that. Mulriply that by a few hundred Joe-jobs and ISP's will rapidly learn to ignore spam complaints.

Alternatively, they could pass every complaint on to the government agency responsible for investigating them, and let them sort out the mess.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[Maestro4k]

I think this isn't really a problem, every time I've signed up for a reputable mailing list I get a very brief E-mail that basically says

"someone from IP xxx.yyy.zzz.000 requested that this address be added to our list. If this was you click below/reply to this E-mail to confirm that you want to subscribe. If you didn't request this you don't need to do anything, your address will not be added to the list and you won't hear from us again."

Now if ACME decides to stray from something that simple and include ads for their products then they might have a problem, but if they keep it simple and short they'll be fine. I can't see any judge or jury defining the example message above as spam, and if anyone is going to get in trouble it will be the person who was using the IP that requested the bogus signup.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[Pig Hogger]

Promotional e-mail, that is.

If I INITIATE a dialogue with a company ("hey, are your whickerbills available in metric sizes?"), they can e-mail me.

It's no rocket science, really, you OPT-IN by INITIATING contact. They just can't send you something out-of-the-blue.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[AaronLawrence]

An "email blast" eh? What a spammy sounding term that is.

Also, you are basically accusing spamcop staff of abusing the system, because no-one else *knows* the spam-trap addresses. That is possible I suppose, nobody is perfect :/

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[Vancorps]

I'm not accusing SpamCop of anything, if anything I stated rather plainly that they were doing their jobs. Only problem is, how to correct the issue with your mailing list if they won't give you their address?

The answer is, ask them for the address, eventually you'll get it out of them, then remove the address from your list.

Of course, periodic reregistration such as a mail once a year where the members have to click a link to remain included in the list is another way to clean house and ensure I'm using the smallest amount of resources available to send out a mass mail. All of it points at our main mail server with full RDNS support. I'd say we effectively do everything we can to ensure we have a proper list of people that actually want to know when we are having an auction. Course we only put on an auction twice a year right now so we don't send out mail that often.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[Guppy06]

"If so, what should ACME do to verify you are you instead?"

You don't. In fact, you abandon the idea of an email list altogether.

If your customers are that interested in your products, let them visit your website periodically. Show your customers how to "subscribe" to your "What's New" page (or perhaps an RSS feed).

The problem is with push marketing as a concept, an in herently offensive concept, not how it is implemented. TV and radio commercials are pull advertising, because you stop getting the ads if you turn off the receivers. Mail advertising is push advertising, but there is at least a cost incurred in using it and that cost works to subsidize the rest of the mail system. But email is a push marketing vehicle that only benefits the sender.

There's a flaw in a marketing scheme when the recipients have to actively tell you to stop sending your messages, regardless if they wanted the messages in the past.

Re:How would you handle this under anti-spam?

[eaolson]

I recently ran into this issue with our mailing list which consists of about 55,000 people. This list is 100% opt-in but regardless, someone didn't like us, so they submitted spamcops trap email address to our list. We included them in our email blast and naturally received a complaint.

From that description, it sounds like you're running an unconfirmed opt-in list. Is there something to stop me from signing up a few thousand of my closest "friends" to the list?

Let technology kill spam, not the government

[ev3nly]

As much as I hate spam as the next guy, it's wrong to let the government get involved with it. A technology to prevent spam will take care of the problem much better then the government ever can and do we really want the government tell us what we can and can't do with our emails?

Re:Let technology kill spam, not the government

[Red Flayer]

Sure, just like technology prevented telemarketers from calling after 9 PM.

The profit incentive (on both sides of the fence, both marketing and anti-spam tech) is to allow Spam to occur, so it will continue if allowed.

This comes at a loss of productivity (economic standpoint) and quality of life (social standpoint), which are bad.

The issue of free speech, however, is quite different. I completely agree with you, that the government should not be allowed to impinge on our right to email what we want.

The answer then, is that we trade the inconvenience of receiving Spam for the right to send our own Spam.

I believe that, over time, Spam will drop to a manageable level, due to private anti-Spam software. Just like snail mail, I'll toss my junk mail without opening it -- or downloading to my local host.

Oh, wait, this is my situation now -- and it works fine for me.

Re:Let technology kill spam, not the government

[Drishmung]

Excellent idea. Alas, no such technology has thus far been forthcoming, nor is there any sign that one is imminent. This despite the very real financial (and other) incentives to develop it.

So, while waiting for a Deus ex machina, I'm all for pursuing other avenues, as well.

Re:Let technology kill spam, not the government

[JesseL]

Normally, I'd agree with you. Unfortunatley the government has already made it illegal to apply the most appropriate technologies to spammers.

Re:Let technology kill spam, not the government

[JanneM]

As much as I hate spam as the next guy, it's wrong to let the government get involved with it. A technology to prevent spam will take care of the problem much better then the government ever can and do we really want the government tell us what we can and can't do with our emails?

As much as I hate murder as the next guy, it's wrong to let the government get involved with it. A technology to prevent murder will take care of the problem much better then the government ever can and do we really want the government tell us what we can and can't do with our weapons?

Re:Let technology kill spam, not the government

[Famanoran]

Bravo. If only I had mod points.

To the grand-parent: Why shouldn't NZ have a law against it?

Anyway, here in NZ we've got elections coming up soon, so it's anyones guess as to what the next parliament do with respect to this bill..

Re:Let technology kill spam, not the government

[Obfuscant]

A technology to prevent spam will take care of the problem much better then the government ever can...

What technology might that be, pray tell?

Filtering works nicely ... once you've gotten one spam with a certain identifiable pattern, and then only until the pattern changes.

It is remarkable how many spams get through even the "commercial" anti-spam filters like barracuda.

and do we really want the government tell us what we can and can't do with our emails?

They aren't telling you what you can and cannot do with your emails, unless you happen to be a spammer, and then the answer is YES, because your emails are causing other people problems.

Re:Let technology kill spam, not the government

[Anonymous Coward]

The appropriate technologies being of an explosive nature, I would hope?

In other News

[OnceDark]

Korean president Kim Jong-il's response to the NRC was "Why give up the amazing human killing devices that are nuclear bombs?"

You couldn't be more right.

[robyannetta]

QUOTE: Anyone else think that one message doesn't count as spam?

You couldn't be more right. If you allow one, you allow

<dr_evil>
      ONE BILLION
</dr_evil>

more spam emails a day.

Sounds like microsoft...

[Geak]

...is planning on taking over the spam industry next. Doesn't suprise me after they removed Claria from their list of spyware in their anti-spyware product. Guess they intend to buy up a bunch of spam companies and take them off their SecureID list for hotmail. Next they will be buying out black hat hackers and writing viruses to send out over the internet. Notice their new anti-virus tool?

NZ ISP's have blocked his announcement as spam

[Prototerm]

Well, if they haven't yet, they surely will soon. (to which Will replied "Don't call me Shirley")

What complete bovine feces

[Anonymous Coward]

Quote: He also wants definitions in the bill changed so that companies would be able to e-mail information about new products and services to customers, even if they had opted out of receiving e-mail about other services they had bought from the company in the past.

I'm sorry, but UBE (Unsolicited Bulk E-mail) is still UBE, even if there is a prior business relationship. Various US companies got well and truly slapped in the past for trying that, and it still doesn't fly today.

Unsoliticied e-mail is still unsolicited e-mail, no matter what the excuse is.

The position M$ is taking on this is complete B.S.

There's a better idea...

[Antony-Kyre]

There is a better idea, and here it is.

Why not create legislation requiring all commercial e-mail to have HOW they got your e-mail address in the first place, under penalty of a huge fine. This would be in addition to any other laws in place. So if someone doesn't say, at the bottom of the e-mail, how or where your e-mail address was obtained, it would be illegal. Also, lying about where they got it would be illegal too.

Or is this just a stupid idea?

Re:There's a better idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is this just a stupid idea?

Yes. Next question..

Re:There's a better idea...

[tommers]

Why woud this be a stupid idea? Its providing users with useful information that in no impinges about marketers ability to send email. If a website is providing user's emails to another company, it is very hard to hold the original party responsible in any way. But if people started getting tons of solicited emails from different companies that all came from signing up at another site, that other site would have a strong disincentive to not give out users emails. While obviously this will only apply to sites that want to obey the law, there are probably lots of legally legit sites passing around their customer's emails, using the fine print as a legal shield.

Re:There's a better idea...

[AaronStJ]

Your post advocates a
 
( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
 
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
 
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
 
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
 
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
 
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
 
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
 
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
 
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Err, no offest, but someone had to do one.

I actually think this isn't a bad idea, it would just never work. The "Requires too much cooperation from spammers" point in enormous. They just simply wouldn't put where your email address was obtained, and there's be nothing we could do about it, and life would go on as normal.

Re:There's a better idea...

[mre5565]

But if people started getting tons of solicited emails from different companies that all came from signing up at another site, that other site would have a strong disincentive to not give out users emails.

What prevents the person sending spam from lying about where the spammer got the email address from?

The problem I see is enforcement.

A variation on a theme is to use disposable email addresses

Re:There's a better idea...

[cduffy]

Send spam in a competitors' name without the legally required trailer. Watch said competitor get hit with lawsuits.

Send spam in your own name. Blatently lie about where you got the addresses. Someone objects? Their word against yours.

Send spam from offshore. Don't bother with the legally required trailer. How's it going to get enforced?

Re:There's a better idea...

[tommers]

There's a huge category of spam that cannot be affected by legislation, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't enact laws that traceable/enforceable companies must file as well. Even if legitimate companies aren't responsible for the most egregious emails, there are still many companies who use inboxes and email addresses in unethical and/or obnoxious manners that are still legal. I think the original posts suggestion was a good addition to the set of options that can improve the situation for companies that have to play by the law and shouldn't be disregarded just because it won't solve a large percentage of the problem on its own.

Re:There's a better idea...

[cduffy]

Err, no offest, but someone had to do one.

I got a kick out of it. Shame the moderators haven't a similar sense of humor.

Re:There's a better idea...

[jacks0n]

( ) Microsoft will not put up with it

Dude. How could you leave this one blank?

Re:There's a better idea...

[Antony-Kyre]

But there are currently some spammers who do actually say how they got your e-mail address. And there'd have to be penalties for spammers to lie about where they got your e-mail address too, huge penalties. (This type of stuff reminds me of how phishers lie too.)

Re:There's a better idea...

[cduffy]

Making the penalties huge makes it all the more tempting to send spam in your competitor's (or, as the case may be, personal enemy's) name without the trailers -- and also makes it all the more tempting to just operate offshore and forget the whole thing.

Re:There's a better idea...

[Antony-Kyre]

Make that kind of deception illegal too. Good companies shouldn't be tarnished by spammers, and should be found innocent if ever going to court for something they didn't do.

Re:There's a better idea...

[cduffy]

It's already illegal -- but how're you going to prove it, particularly if they go through an offshores 3rd party?

Re:There's a better idea...

[Antony-Kyre]

That is the prosecutor's job to prove it by providing evidence and such.

Re:There's a better idea...

[cduffy]

Oh, so you're talking criminal rather than civil law?

You do realize that DA's offices are generally overworked enough that they only prosecute a token number of spam-related cases, even though a very large number of these are already prosecutable already under preexisting law [such as fraud]? Given that that's true, how do you think adding more laws will make it any better?

Re:There's a better idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes it is a stupid idea. Why? Because they would lie.

Re:There's a better idea...

[cyberphotographer]

Closing the holes in Windows would be a start: nearly all the spam I receive comes via botnetted Windows broadband accounts.

Re:There's a better idea...

[Antony-Kyre]

But it would still be illegal and punishable.

& opposition from Microsoft is a "seal of qual

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's unsolicited then it's spam.

And around here many will also agree (for good reasons) that any law opposed by Microsoft is endowed with a presumption of merit.

Can live without it

[Nom du Keyboard]

impinge on 'the amazing vehicle of e-mail marketing'.

I can live without this amazing invention -- especially because I'm not making any money from it -- just aggravation.

Some people just truly don't have a clue.

Thank You For Letting Me Know About Your Product!

[Anonymous Coward]

I never get how anyone can ever use the argument that some people might "want" spam. If you want to buy something, you can find it on the net. I NEVER want to be inundated with junk adverts.

[Unsolicited endorsement for product that supposedly eliminates unsolicited endorsments via email, eliminated]

Err... Me too?

Duh!

[Locke2005]

Microsoft makes money by providing Spam filtering and by suing spammers under CAN-SPAM. Anybody that expects Microsoft to be in favor of anything that reduces one or more of their revenue streams is obviously delusional.

if spam were like snail mail

[dlt074]

i'd just reply to sender and cost them money. via used bandwidth. unfortunately most spam never has a real reply-to address. when i get snail mail credit card offers with postage paid envelopes i like to fill them with other credit card companies offers and mail them back costing them money. it doesn't do anything but make me feel better and cost them a little money. but if enough people did it... they'd have to rethink their model.
does MS make any money from spam? it can't be that much if they do. is there not a market they have their fingers in?

LSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

So is this guy doing some serious drugs or what?

Guess MicroSquishies only chance to not get buried by negative publicity for this is to fire the guy with extreme prejudice, then bury the body in the Marianis Trench in a lead casket.

Talk about a major case of athletes tongue.

I don't get it.

[munpfazy]

I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but this just doesn't make sense.

What does Microsoft have to gain by crippling anti-spam regulation? They don't spam, and as far as I know they don't actively partner with those who do. Wouldn't it be in their own best interest to push for *more* aggressive anti spam tactics?

It would be naive to assume a rational basis for most business decisions, but when an otherwise publicity-savvy company steps forward to fight for something which is not only stupid but also wildly unpopular, there's got to be some explanation.

Re:I don't get it.

[rujholla]

They don't spam, and as far as I know they don't actively partner with those who do.

Umm didn't they just buy Clarion software -- formerly known as Gator. Isn't a big income source for spyware companies selling email addresses?

Re:I don't get it.

[Daniel Phillips]

when an otherwise publicity-savvy company steps forward to fight for something which is not only stupid but also wildly unpopular, there's got to be some explanation

How about: Microsoft has plans to sell an anti-spam serivce.

Re:I don't get it.

[Shaper_pmp]

How about: Microsoft makes money by sueing spammers? Not a lot, to be fair, but the publicity is great - "good old Microsoft defending you against the people making your lives a misery". Of course, moves like this opposition to a proper anti-spam bill have the opposite effect, but who's going to hear about this outside of the nerd set, most of whom already dislike or distrust Microsoft anyway?

Or: Microsoft recently bought Gator/Claria, whose sole asset is their database of non-opted-in e-mail addresses? These laws would make that unusable, and would probably demand its immediate deletion. Even assuming they weren't going to use it for UCE (too... evil... even for... MS...?), that's still millions of dollars and a huge potential asset to have to throw away.

Or, yes: Microsoft plans to sell anti-spam services. "Personal" solutions would probably be free (very little cost to them, lots of good publicity), but enterprise-level (eg an Exchange Server plugin) could be worth thousands. Or at least, non-OSS-friendly companies would likely pay that much for a "Microsoft approved" solution.

Either way, this is just another slimy move to add to the list. Is anyone keeping a database of all the shitty things like this Microsoft is doing, or would it be too big a job for anybody to handle?

Lots of people don't think one message is spam

[btempleton]

Including of course, those who were around for the original definition of the term, based on the endless repetition of "spam, spam, spam, spam..." in the MP sketch. From the start it was always the volume of messages that was the issue.

This is in fact however an issue of much debate, with many people on both sides, sometimes called the UBE side and the UCE side. I'm on the UBE side (in fact I think the best and simplest definition for spam is 'bulk mail from a stranger') and there are many on that side.

The truth is it's not hard to show mathematically that non-bulk mail, even of the most annoying kind, won't ever become a problem worth spending much worry on. Since we want to be sure we protect individual person to person mail from any collateral damage in the fight against spam, it seems misplaced to worry about more than bulk mail.

Some essays relating to that question:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spam/2camps.html

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spam/define.html

Re:Lots of people don't think one message is spam

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that you will never get every american, chinese, korean and russian spamming company to cooperate on sending just one message.

They'll each want to send their own, making it not one but thousand of messages, and some of them will keep sending the same crap every day. To everyone on their illegimately obtained list. That's not one message, that's billions of messages.

I want....

[varmittang]

What he's smoking! =)

Re:I want....

[WilliamSChips]

You have to be a Microsoft executive to get that. It's especially potent stuff, you know.

Microsoft serious about squashing SPAM?

[Eric Damron]

"Mr Hamlin says Microsoft would like to see the bill changed so that businesses could be confident they could continue to use databases that they had already compiled to send out e-mail."
i.e. So that businesses could continue to SPAM.
"He also wants definitions in the bill changed so that companies would be able to e-mail information about new products and services to customers, even if they had opted out of receiving e-mail about other services they had bought from the company in the past."
So if I tell a company that I don't want their penis enlargement ads they can SPAM me with an ad for their latest p0rn and so on and so on and. . ."
"Though often criticised as too meek, US anti-spam legislation - which relies on people opting out of spam - has proved effective in supporting prosecutions and deterring spammers, he says."
Right, that's why my filters catch move SPAM every month than the previous. It's only the filtering technology that keeps email usable.

Is Microsoft really serious about squashing SPAM or just in finding another cow to milk? What was this I heard about Microsoft wanting to buy the company that use to be called Gator? Seems to me that SPAM and AD ware go hand in hand.

Re:Microsoft serious about squashing SPAM?

[Moraelin]

It's especially that part about allowing them to send notifications for "new" stuff, regardless of whether you opted out before or not, that's especially worrying me. It's a free license to spam.

Think about it. It doesn't say new _categories_, so it doesn't even have to mean they'd have drop penis enlargement pills once you've opted out. They can make you opt out of _one_ _product_ at a time, then rename it or call it a new version, and spam you some more.

E.g., spam advertising porn, could spam you with a different combination of web site and category in each batch of mails, and opting out of one wouldn't prevent them from sending the next batch. They could just make a bogus "hosted site" for each batch, which just redirects to the main one, but hey, it's for a "new" service (site) you haven't yet opted out of. So they're allowed.

In fact, it makes it worse than no opt-out at all. To actually unsubscribe from all that, you'd have to actually open the message and look for the unsubscribe link for that product, then email the spammer. From a spammer's perspective it's actually better: they made you open and read his spam instead of just looking at the message and deleting it.

So seeing MS back such a license to spam with impunity, makes me really worry.

One e-mail = SPAM?

[Spy der Mann]

Of course, receiving one e-mail might not...

but what if 10,000 companies send you ONLY ONE e-mail each?

We have to be strict, gentlemen. ONE rat might not be a plague, but...

Re:One e-mail = SPAM?

[binkzz]

"ONE rat might not be a plague, but..."

...but one rat could cause the plague.

Re:One e-mail = SPAM?

[Zey]

...but one rat could cause the plague.

Er, no. One rat might carry plague but it certainly doesn't cause or create the plague virus.

Re:One e-mail = SPAM?

[NewStarRising]

No single raindrop will take responsibility for the flood.

One message? Is that per company? per dept? Per outgoing address?
"No, we sent you ONE message (from admin@corp.com).
Also you were sent ONE mail from sales@corp.com.
And ONE from sales@corp.net
and ONE from sales@corp.biz
and one each from our 10,000 subsidiary companies.

Lots of people don't think one message is spam?

[WillAffleckUW]

The truth is it's not hard to show mathematically that non-bulk mail, even of the most annoying kind, won't ever become a problem worth spending much worry on. Since we want to be sure we protect individual person to person mail from any collateral damage in the fight against spam, it seems misplaced to worry about more than bulk mail.

Well, as someone who has some pages that show up in Chinese and Taiwanese and Hong Kong and Russian search engines, I can say that when you think of only 25 million people being online, the concept of one message being spam sounds silly.

But I get spam from India, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Russia, and a bunch of other places, so the idea of 6,000,000,000 people all being able to send one message may not be spam to you, but it sure the heck is spam to ME!

It's the "it's ok so long as just I'm doing it" concept that created spam in the first place. Back when UseNet was fresh and 300 baud modems were fast, it wasn't an issue if someone posted that they wanted to sell their car for $800 or best offer, cause there weren't many of us on it.

But now that all you unwashed masses are online, it's a really big irritation, and why half of the 100 emails I get every day are spam.

Re:Lots of people don't think one message is spam?

[btempleton]

You're not thinking through the math. When there are millions and billions of people online, there are too many target addresses as well as lots of senders.

Non-bulk mail is mail written personally for you. Not form letters. Not even one person telling a room of 100 slaves "everybody write personal messages all day." These are all bulk mail. Somebody (not the slaves, the guy giving the orders) tried to send mail to a lot of people who didn't know him.

If there were a billion people on E-mail and ten million of them sat all day thinking of personal annoying messages to send out, and they could write 100 of these in a day, on average you would get one a day. But in fact these numbers are ridiculous, you would not get this many people just randomly deciding to write personal messages to strangers.

Consider this message:

"Hi, I have been following your company for a while, and you are doing cool stuff. I'm skilled at what you do and could really help on product X for the following reasons. Do you have an opening for somebody like me?"

Do you want to ban this message? This one, where the guy researched the company and had a reason to be mailing that specific company about that specfic product, not a message like this written as part of a "mail everybody I can think of" campaign.

No, you don't, so don't write your rules to ban this. Fortunately, there is no need to write them that way, so why create a fight with your otherwise allies just for the sake of banning something you don't need to ban?

Re:Lots of people don't think one message is spam?

[Shaper_pmp]

Nice idea, but that dog just won't hunt.

"When there are millions and billions of people online, there are too many target addresses as well as lots of senders."

Right. But the current system is that one person can (over time) send billions of messages. And since spammers addresses rarely end up on the web (or in other spammers' mailing lists), they can keep sending spam no matter how many "real" people have addresses. Also, once you're on a list you end up on a lot of lists, so while 90% of the population might not get any spam, the other 10% will get it all. How would you like to be one of those 10%?

"Non-bulk mail is mail written personally for you. Not form letters. Not even one person telling a room of 100 slaves "everybody write personal messages all day." These are all bulk mail. Somebody (not the slaves, the guy giving the orders) tried to send mail to a lot of people who didn't know him."

I see your position now, but I still don't agree. How can you possibly prove that any single spam wasn't generated by a template+mailing list?

You can't. And how do you define "writing a personal message"? I could type three e-mail addresses then type a message to them all, or I could cut-and-paste them from a list into a message I wrote first. Or I could produce a template message, and dynamically insert all three names from a database into the message before sending it. How many names is "non-personal"? What level of indirection does there have to be before it's not "writing" the mail? These are all inherently vague weasel-words, with no useful functional definition.

"Hi, I have been following your company for a while, and you are doing cool stuff. I'm skilled at what you do and could really help on product X for the following reasons. Do you have an opening for somebody like me?"

That's a fair point - while some people (like me) would consider this acceptable, others could use an anti-spam law to get the sender in trouble. The thing is, unless the sender pisses off the recipient, he's not going to get in trouble. And if the sender pisses off the recipient, there's no chance it'll result in business so there's no point seding the message, period.

In other words, it's fine to flout the law if you know the other party isn't going to mind. Simply by requiring that someone complains first, the law would protect you from unwanted messages, while allowing wanted ones through.

"No, you don't, so don't write your rules to ban this. Fortunately, there is no need to write them that way, so why create a fight with your otherwise allies just for the sake of banning something you don't need to ban?"

Sigh. If you don't mind message like this, you won't report them. In the same way a masochist doesn't get a dominatrix who stamps on his nuts done for assault. As long as one person has to complain before the sender is prosecuted, you can send as many messages as you like. Fuck it - even make it so each incident of spamming has a fixed penalty. When a spam is caught, the fine is proportional to the number of complaints received, and distributed equally between the complainers.

UCE that turns out to be wanted attracts no penalty. Unwanted UCE attracts a penalty in proportion to the number of people it annoys and the amount of time it wastes. However, the only way to enshrine this in law is to make all UCE illegal, but to selectively enforce based on complaints.

If the majority of people don't care than spamming should be allowed, and spammers can profit. If (as we all suspect) most people don't want most spam they receive, spammers get hit with massive fines and go out of business.

Either way, the will of the majority is served.

Re:Lots of people don't think one message is spam?

[Obfuscant]

You're not thinking through the math. When there are millions and billions of people online, there are too many target addresses as well as lots of senders.

Well, the spammers aren't "thinking through the math" either, then. They're doing something now called "dictionary spam", where they don't bother harvesting anything but domain names (and they've got a free source for those.) They then send emails to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of addresses at each domain name. Don't believe it? Well, I've seen the logs from just such spamming, until I shut off the logs for failed delivery attempts.

Billions of people on the net slowing things down? Hardly. Just more likely for the tens of billions of dictionary spams to hit a target.

Do you want to ban this message? This one,

that message is not bulk. It's not spam. But ONE copy of a bulk message appearing in my mailbox certainly is spam. That's the "one message" that the subject refers to.

Information Week tokes MS crack pipe

[pdmoderator]

US magazine Information Week last week reported that there are signs spam is "nowhere near the problem it was a few years ago", in part because of filtering technology.

Correct. Spam is far worse than it was a few years ago.

Yeah? Well as an American

[Belial6]

As an America, I'd love to see this bill come into effect too. The fewer havens for spammers the better.

Monsieur, it's "just one" wafer thin leetle spam..

[dennypayne]

Sure, everybody trusts the spammer who sends you "just one" email to take you off his list when you reply, right? Right.

I say more power to those who are pushing for zero tolerance.

Denny

One message isn't spam, but...

[argent]

One message isn't spam. Microsoft is welcome to send one message to me. At least if that's all they do... send one message. To me.

If they send one message to 100,000 people, that's not one message any more. That's 100,000 messages.

If 100,000 people send one message back to Microsoft saying "take me off your list" that's still not one message, that's 100,000 messages.

No, one message isn't spam. But I don't think that they really mean "one message". Do you?

Re:One message isn't spam, but...

[WillAffleckUW]

So, if everyone in China sends one message to you, that's ok, right?

Well, there goes your email account ...

Re:One message isn't spam, but...

[jcr]

One message isn't spam.

I disagree. If the message is 1) unsolicited, and 2) trying to sell me something, then it's spam.

-jcr

Re:One message isn't spam, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if everyone in China sends one message to you, that's ok, right?

Yes, but how are you going to get that many people to agree on what to say in that one message? Without getting the message bigger than the message size limit?

Re:One message isn't spam, but...

[argent]

if everyone in China sends one message to you [...]

If everyone in China is doing it, then someone is coordinating them. Whever is doing it is the person responsible for sending the messages, the individuals who actually sent them are just proxies. So, that person has sent however many billions of messages that is.

Well, there goes your email account

Nah, I already drop SMTP from China at the IP level.

No, I'm not kidding. If you're in a netblock that's been identified as being in China, Korea, Argentina, any dynamic IP space, or several ISPs like telefonica.es... you can't send me mail.

I literally can't afford the bandwidth to read the messages to spam-filter them any more.

Re:One message isn't spam, but...

[argent]

If the message is unsolicited and trying to sell you something, you are entitled to assume it's spam, and if I get a message like that I'll assume it's spam too.

What I'm getting at, though, is that if it's spam, if that message hadn't been sent in the hundreds of thousands... it wouldn't have been sent at all. There's no profit in sending ONE unsolicited advertisement and stopping. What makes it happen is that it's so cheap to send advertisements in bulk email, and that the spammer doesn't have to wait for people to ask for it.

Without bulk and without unsolicited it's a problem. Without the sales... it's still a problem. There's lots of non-commercial spam -- religious spam, political spam, hoaxes and jokes -- and spam would still be a problem (albeit a much much smaller one) without money involved. Without bulk, though, it wouldn't exist.

That's what I mean when I say "one message isn't spam". One message may be damned good evidence of spam, but the bulkness is an essential part of what makes it happen and what makes it a problem.

Legislative solutions are never going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Legislative solutions are never going to work. If legislators ever manage to pass a useful anti-spam bill, spammers will simply move to countries where the laws are not in effect. Technical solutions are required. http://spamhole.com/Spamhole.com and dodgeit are examples of working solutions that dont require lobbying and aren't limited by borders.

No, Money follows MS

[Anonymous Coward]

I ahve reported this before. The guy from Denver that recently accepted a plea, basically tried an end-run around MS and got caught.

He was paying MSN for addresses, bandwidth, and IPs. MSN was charging him (and presumably others) 1 million a month for this. Anyways, MSN Apparently uped the rate to 5 million / month. This guy then came to another local ISP and approach them. The deal was the same except he would pay 2 million/month. Problem was, that the CEO was at least golfing buddies with Gates. It got back to gates within the week. So MS siced the FBI on him. If you look carefully at the deal, he is not allowed to discuss all of details associated with the case. This is one of the details. BTW, AOL and Yahoo do the same. I have heard so do companies such as comcast.

Basically, can-spam was not about killing spam as much as limiting to the big boys. This is simply a payout for the large ISPS.

American legislation.

[Anonymous Coward]

As if it matters. Listen up chump:

1. You're a commoner.

2. In America, the opinions of commoners don't matter.

3. And so, your opinion, however appropriate or ethical, remains null and void.

Have a good day.

Sincerely,
Your Government (Always here to protect and serve).

A different approach

[Emperor Cezar]

This is the same as it always as been. If indeed spam is comming from illegally infected machines, then prosecute for that. You can make as many laws as you want, you have to inforce the ones you have or making anymore will do no good.

Oh woe is MS, perish the thought!

[Anonymous Coward]

warning that it could impinge on 'the amazing vehicle of e-mail marketing'.

Good.

Go-Go Aussie Anti-Spam Bill!

Re:Oh woe is MS, perish the thought!

[one_red_god]

aussie spam bill? wrong coutry. though we do let some of them in from time to time..

Not...really.

[Mr. Underbridge]

Gee, the proposed law seems to me to work very much like the do not call list of telemarketing. I.E. Do not call unless you've been asked. That works better than voluntary do not spam lists don't you think

Except it's not. DNC is opt-out, ie you get phone spam unless you join the list. And we sure as hell don't want email to have a centralized list, because that's basically going to be the uber spam list.

The difference is that foreign phone spammers would incur pretty significant charges to phone spam, whereas the same is not true for spam.

Re:Not...really.

[Bullfish]

In Britain, they can't call unless you give them permission ahead of time.

The Russian Method

[GlL]

I'm in favor of the Russian anti-Spam method for dealing with spammers. http://www.scmagazine.com/news/index.cfm?fuseactio n=newsDetails&newsUID=5eead5c2-50ca-40e5-9c59-a8da 453de038&newsType=Latest+News I could even envision a new arcade smash hit: "Whack-a-Spammer" Sorry, I work for an ISP, and get to deal with the annoying results of these idiot spammers' actions. I couldn't resist

Re:The Russian Method

[teknomage1]

Unfortunately for every spammer you kill, two rise up to take his place.

CANSPAM law effective my ass

[nurb432]

I have NOT seen any decrease in spam since it was enacted.

It has steadily increased, as it has been doing for years.

Re:CANSPAM law effective my ass

[BCW2]

Amen to that. My filters are cleaning out 5x or more times what they did three years ago. I now bundle all of it and send it to the FTC. When I am bored I send each one individually. They can prosecute, or their server will crash, I don't really care. Soon Congress will appropriate more of my money for more/better servers without looking at the root problem that they created.

AS for the clown from M$, I don't know what he's smoking but he needs to share, and I quit that shit twenty years ago!

Re:CANSPAM law effective my ass

[Antique Geekmeister]

It's worse. The clause that a lot of bulk mail includes about how it is legal under the CAN-SPAM act, and how you can opt out of it and see how legal their spam is, is one of the strongest indicators that the message is actually spam that I have seen in years. I have not seen a single non-spam message that discussed its compliance with CAN-SPAM. In fact, out of the dozen or so I've seen this week, every single one that talked about CAN-SPAM was in fact in violation of CAN-SPAM because they were actually using CAN-SPAM unsubscribe messages to record new mail addresses for other spam, but usually from another address. (I add a few throwaway accounts every month for precisely such tests of spam behavior.)

What about junk mail?

[ad0gg]

Since people equate spam to junk mail. I use pizza coupons all time from junk mail. I guess that makes me a bad person for supporting junk mail.

Re:What about junk mail?

[misleb]

I don't think people equate junk mail and spam as much as you think. Here are a few reasons:

- The sender has to pay to send junk mail. In other words, nobody's resources are getting abused.

- It is self limiting. It costs money to print and send junk mail (see above).

- Junk mail is well regulated. I don't think they can send things like porno adverts in the mail.

Re:What about junk mail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Junk Fax. Email and Usenet spam are the social equivalent of junk fax, which were well regulated by US Criminal Code Section 18, paragraph 2701. There were court challenges against it by junk faxers, but the abuses and waste before it were so obvious that the courts ruled it was clearly beyond free speech to be wasting every one else's resources this way.

There have been several bills to extend the law to cover spam, but they've all been shot down by companies like Microsoft and by the Direct Marketing Association, a lobbying group for "direct marketing" companies: that's right, junk mailers, telemarketers, and spammers.

Re:What about junk mail?

[BrokenHalo]

I use pizza coupons all time from junk mail. I guess that makes me a bad person for supporting junk mail.

No, it doesn't. It's perfectly possible to have fun with junk mail. My favourite is to take the unwanted pre-printed credit card applications, put them through the shredder, stuff the resulting mess into the pre-paid envelope and post it back at the mailer's expense.

Re:What about junk mail?

[It'sYerMam]

Then put 33 cents in another envelope and complain that you want it back. And then post it to bash.org

Make selling personal info illegal

[sinewalker]

They should legislate against these parasite companies that on-sell your personal contact data to other companies. How dare the magazine company I (used to) subscribe to sell my details to a company pushing drugs? I didn't authorise it, I'm not interested. How many other companies have my details been sold to and how much money did the magazine proffit from this activity? I want a slice of it to pay for my time in cleaning up the SPAM I've recieved (both electronic and snail-spam, which is worse because it fills my letter box and lets local burgalars know when I'm not at home -- therefore it has arguably had an impact on my insurance premiums too...)

I say, go NZ, and I hope more countries follow suit!

Once I signed up for Hot Mail... got spam instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft, ya gotta wonder?
I once signed up for a Hot Mail Account, years ago and never used it, never told a sole about it, never shared the email address with anyone, not one person or other... guess what? Within days my inbox was loaded full of Porn and other spam... my guess is that Microsoft fed them my email address and got paid for it.

You can never trust Microsoft. Too greedy. Computers users to them are just cash machines and not private citizens.

I for one welcome our Spam Overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

and trust them to fill our inboxes to overflowing each and every day, without cessation.

Re:I for one welcome our Spam Overlords

[WillAffleckUW]

well, you obviously don't get 100 frickin emails a day in your main home email account ...

Conspiracy

[Comatose51]

Recently MS acquire Frontbridge a spam filtering company that was highly effective in its job of stopping virus and spams. You pay a monthly fee and all your mail goes through them before reaching your mail servers. I guess M$ see spam fighting as the next source of revenue for the company. With spam costing people billions of dollars in lost productivity, who wouldn't pay a few hundred millions to get rid of it. Of course, if the government stepped in and put a dent in the problem, that's just that much more lost revenue for M$'s new acquisitions. That would be communist/terrorists. We should leave all the problem solving to corporations... Right.

Audio interview w/ Hamlin on this topic

[yem]

Coralcached link (3Mb)

Now we know.

[Stumbles]

Ok Billy boy, I think it safe to say myself and a whole lota' other folks did not fall off the turnip truck today... or yesterday..... or the day before.

However, I do have to hand it to Microsoft. They had allready lost my repsect and trust several versions of their OS back. Now they have passed my loath indicator. It really takes a scumbag to call Spam "an amazing vehicle of e-mail marketing'.

Explains quite well some of the companies they purchased this year.

M$ is now an arbiter of the democratic process?

[weighn]

What strikes me is how M$ can see fit to even comment on the laws of a foreign country. What are they headed by some section of the Bush administration?

Re:M$ is now an arbiter of the democratic process?

[Anonymous Coward]

You spotted that ... Thankfully NZ isn't governed by Bush, although Australia seems to be.

Re:M$ is now an arbiter of the democratic process?

[jesterzog]

For what it's worth, Microsoft is (also) a New Zealand company. It was registered at the NZ Companies Office on 29 May 1991. It really is an American company, but I guess they at least have a claim to comment on New Zealand law.

Re:M$ is now an arbiter of the democratic process?

[weighn]

Thankfully NZ isn't governed by Bush, although Australia seems to be.

Sad but true. Bush lauds Howard as a shining light of democracy. Wonder if he realises that most Australians don't want their troops in Iraq, the Telstra sale, the student union changes, etc ,etc. Democracy. Yeah, right.

Opt Out

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Ryan Hamlin needs a lesson in the limitations of opt-out systems. To teach him this lesson, all /. readers who happen to meet Mr. Hamlin should kick him in the nuts. Keep kicking him until he asks you to stop (e.g. opts out). There is often a delay in processing opt out requests, so it's OK to kick him a few times even after he opts out. After you've accepted and processed Mr. Hamlin opt out requst and have stopped kicking him in the nuts, feel free to begin kicking him in the ass. After all, just because he opted out of being kicked in the nuts, doesn't mean he also opted out of being kicked somewhere else.

Re:Opt Out

[yo_tuco]

LOL

How absolutely insidious

[Gorbag]

M$, having a preexisting business relationship with practically anyone with a computer (you have windows? Office? Exploder? etc.) can freely spam away under CAN-SPAM. No wonder they love it so much, and want to preserve its provisions everywhere. Why spam yourself and get into trouble, when for a few pennies more you can hire M$ to do the spamming for you - presto - no liability for anyone! I think it's time to can CAN-SPAM and get something that really covers the intent of the public.

No Surprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

However, he says the New Zealand Government's Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill is "too broad" and could impinge on "the amazing vehicle of e-mail marketing".

Since Microsoft is a marketing company, naturally they'd object. It wouldn't matter to Microsoft if they sold toasters or software. The only difference would be the EULA they applied to the product.

Re:Duh! (diversionary tactics)

[gosand]

Microsoft makes money by providing Spam filtering and by suing spammers under CAN-SPAM. Anybody that expects Microsoft to be in favor of anything that reduces one or more of their revenue streams is obviously delusional.

Not to mention that if people weren't so concerned about SPAM, they might start to worry about the security of their OS.

What? New worm hit the internet? AHH! LOOK OVER THERE!!! SPAM!!!!

Anti spam legislation

[one_red_god]

As another (wow, at my count up to four of us) Kiwi, i say go for it. It is really an extension of what most local authorities aka councils already prohibit. Mass distribution of advertising media is a contravention of many bylaws around Nz. You aren't supposed to pile my letterbox with random mail if i clearly display a no junk mail sticker. (If my local postie wasn't a stoner it might work.) It's like those flyers you get on your car windshied. You cannot legally do that either under my local council bylaws, and if you get caught, then you get a NZ$150 fine. Not much, but a deterrant nonetheless. I also enjoy our attitude toward justice. Rather than suing an individual, a local is more likely to turn up on thier doorstep and ask politeley that they refrain from sending them spam. With a big dog.. just out for a walk of course... Our governemtn seems pretty switched on when it comes to cyber 'crime' (be spam a crime or not).. yet they let our local telco's charge unbelieveable amounts of money for what hardly constitues as boradband. 256kb anyone? NZ$39.90 a month? awesome. perhaps i dont as much spam here because i simply cannot download it all?

At last I see the light....

[KwKSilver]

All this time I've thought that my "Inbox" was being hammered by no good, scum-sucking, bottom-feeding slimeballs. But according to Mr. Microsoft I've just been selfishly refusing to participate in the "amazing vehicle of e-marketing."

Come to think of it it can be amazing, miraculous even. How else could I get offers for full versons of XP Pro ("SP2") and Office Pro for less than the upgrade price of either? I had simply concluded they were copyright-infringing IP thieves. What a silly penguin I am. So do XP Pro and Office run on Debian or FreeBSD?

So when can we expect to see all of MS's officers, employee and stockholder e-mail addresses posted publicly on the Net ... to further the "amazing vehicle of e-marketing?"

How did MS come to have any authority?

[sgage]

OK, I've been in this biz since 1976. MS was nothing then, a purveyor of a barely adequate BASIC interpreter (that, true to form, they ripped off from somebody else, and secured with virulent patents - from DAY ONE. Notice the pattern).

My question is... Why do people put up with this shit? What happened? Who cares what MS thinks? I guess I've just about had it with this bullshit. MS is an emperor with no clothes. They're just a bit bloated bag of shit. I don't care about my /. karma or any other such nonsense. Why can't people just see that the emperor has no clothes? And is full of shit? Has PR and marketing budgets totally overcome people's ability to think rationally? WTF???

Seriously folks. MS was extremeley toxic from day ONE. They totally subverted and perverted the whole notion of the personal computer. Doesn't anyone remember the early 80's? My question is how this was allowed to happen, how did they do it? It blows my mind. Sort of like the Bush admistration - do people like bending over and getting... well, you know.

Gates, like Bush, is a scumbag of the first water, and now he's the richest person on the planet. WTF? Something is so seriously wrong, that it defies description.

OK, I feel a tiny bit better now. But only a tiny bit, because it seems the world is completely bamboozeled by the MS bullshit machine.

Over and out.

- s

Re:Once I signed up for Hot Mail... got spam inste

[Dr. Mystery]

"I once signed up for a Hot Mail Account"..."Within days my inbox was loaded full of Porn". From the sound of things, you should have been expecting it (or maybe you'd have preferred a 'Hot Male' account?)

I wanted spam...

[ModernGeek]

...when I was like 8 years old. I just wanted some email to read. I didn't know where to goto on the internet, or where anything is. I bet new computer users might enjoy it IN MODERNATION, and would like it if they could opt-out. If SPAM was marked with an identifier in the header, and all mail clients let it come in automatically, and the offers were legit, then it might actaully work. But all this V1@GR4 NOW@@@ isn't gonna cut it.

Re:Yeah? Well as an American

[ZenShadow]

I've heard of large consicous beings, but one of the Americas actually posts to Slashdot? Daaaamn. :-)

--S

First you slice them, then you dice them

[shanen]

That's the law I want for the spammers.

Anyway, as I've said eleventeen times, spam is an economic problem and non-economic solutions are not going to fix it. The fundamental assumption of SMTP is that email is free as in beer, and there is no such thing. Even the free beer was paid for by some method.

Actually, I think there should be two economic models incorporated into an opt-in improvement. (And it can be done while maintaining good compatibility with SMTP, too.) The first model should apply to normal correspondence on basically a mutual exchange basis. As long as you receive roughly the same amount of email as you are sending, then the accounting is just to make sure that things stay roughly in balance.

For advertising email, we need a separate economic model. My own goal for that model would be to soak the advertisers, but if they're legitimate businesses, then they can pay for it. Specifically, I want to specify how much advitising I'm willing to receive, say 15 minutes per day, and then the advertisers would bid for my time. Highest bidders would be allowed to deliver their email. The bidding should reflect such factors as what kinds of things I want to buy, my own economic situation, and past dealings with that company (good or bad).

Re:First you slice them, then you dice them

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, spam is an economic problem--but where is the money coming from? Usually spam identifies the ultimate sponsor---the product it advertizes. And usually there is a link to where you could buy the product. So, can we make it infeasible for these sponsors to pay for this type of advertizing? It is inexpensive to send out a million emails, but getting a million bogus orders would be at least slighting annoying. Or even a million replies (to the advertized company) asking that they discontinue use of such marketing techniques.

Im'convinced that....

[p.rican]

spam will never be completely controlled so I only give out my gmail email.....spammesilly@gmail.com.

oh shit

Now we know why ...

[Anonymous Coward]

the internet needs an identity layer. So Microsoft knows who needs a delivery via the amazing vehicle of email marketing.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/23/21 18251&tid=158&tid=109&tid=11

1. Apply Internet Identity Layer
2. Dilute legislative barriers to spamming
3. Take the amazing vehicle on a road trip!
4. MORE PROFIT

Seriously, I hope this moron keeps talking. Perhaps he could make a contribution on the evils of OSS.

Missed something

[dark grep]

Have I missed something here, or isn't "the amazing vehicle of e-mail marketing" spam?

So an anti-spam bill will stop spam. Go figure.

Opt out mechanism is flawed

[ferretous]

Anybody who receives a lot of SPAM (you know who you are!) would need to spend countless hours every day choosing to opt out of future SPAM. The process is consequently fundamentally flawed and clearly favours SPAMmers. Imagine the same system with cold callers at your front door. You would have to open the door, hear what they have to say before deciding that you didn't in fact want strangers knocking on your door whenever they wanted.

It is surprising to hear MS objecting to opt in systems though. It does suggest some conflicts of interests. On the one hand they claim that SPAM is annoying, wasteful and destructive and yet here we hear that they support the 'right' of companies to legitimately market to 'customers' in an unsolicited manner.

Another rather sinister aspect of a lot of SPAM today is that many includedembedded URLs which when activated (either by clicking or just opening the email) attempt to open the source web page, thereby quietly confirming that you are in fact a real person. So in these cases, opt out is too late.

Re:Opt out mechanism is flawed

[KwKSilver]

Not only is opt-out flawed from the get-go, but

He also wants definitions in the bill changed so that companies would be able to e-mail information about new products and services to customers, even if they had opted out of receiving e-mail about other services they had bought from the company in the past.

So under Mr. Microsoft's proposal SPAMMERS could continue to SPAM us under the pretense of a new or changed product: changing the product typeface on the label from 37 point type to 39 point type, or the backgroung color of the box from pale brown to yellow. What a load of Longhorn-crap.

Was that...

[Vombatus]

Microsoft Word Sux?

Why not just use double-opt-in?

[khasim]

Anyone can submit any address, but they'll have to reply to that email or click on a link in it to be subscribed.

There, end of problem.

Then just include easy opt-out instructions at the bottom of each message you send out.

The REAL problem is if someone outside of SpamCop knows their spamtrap addresses. With that info, it would be simple to render SpamCop 100% ineffective.

Re:Why not just use double-opt-in?

[Vancorps]

Well I got the address from them eventually, I imagine they have several they use. Basically I got it off my list and all is well.

You're right about the double opt-in approach. I neglected to mention that as being part of our solution.

As far as Opt-out, we provide a link in every email. They click it, it brings up a plain webpage with just the words, "Would you like to unsubscribe from our lists?" There is a Yes button. They click it and they are removed from our database.

I don't really like this approach but it is the best thing I can think of. I get a large number of spam to my domain and I really don't think I'd ever click unsubscribe to any of those links. Of course you rarely ever get emails from the same address so I suppose from their perspective it is a bit different.

Anyone have Ryan Hamlin's email address???

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got some great offers I'd like him to see.

Re:Once I signed up for Hot Mail... got spam inste

[drsmithy]

Within days my inbox was loaded full of Porn and other spam... my guess is that Microsoft fed them my email address and got paid for it.

I've had that happen with email accounts on private mailservers. It's from spammers sending to a@hotmail.com, b@hotmail.com, c@hotmail.com, etc, etc.

Anything that chaps MSFT is good

[Anonymous Coward]

And anything they support is bad for the consumer.

They make some decent joysticks and trackballs. And Ages of Empires 2 was pretty good. Dungeon Siege was LONG, but that remarkablely innovative "loot all" was excellent and halped move the game along.

So. Anything other than joysticks, trackballs, and games, is bad for the consumer.

Can an ego be too big...

[Belial6]

Well really, it's just that mine is the only opinion that matters...Well, mine and some guy in Peru that I've never met. Hence the "an" as opposed to "the".

Re:Yeah? Well as an American

[thisissilly]

Ditto. Once this passes in .nz, we should talk to our elected officials about how we need to "harmonize" our anti-spam laws with theirs, and make ours tougher.

Microsoft.trustworthylevel=0

[timbo234]

This kind of thing shows why Microsoft just isn't trustworthy when it comes to security and privacy issues. For every good idea they have they have an equally bad idea that plays into the spyware-makers or spammers or crackers hands. Eg:

Good: Major security upgrade in Win XP SP2.

Bad: Accelerating marketing/political campaign to convince people that they are only safe with signed software. Ignores fact that most spyware out there is signed - signing provides no verification of software's function or motives/background of signer.

Good: Announces testing MS Anti-spyware Beta program which will be free to Windows users.

Bad: Apparent moves to downgrade or eliminate detection of the notorious Gator/Claria spyware due to commercial agreement with that company.

Good: Actively enthusiastic about SPF technology to counter forged emails

Bad: Soon emerges that MS's implementation is an attempt to use patents lock open-source software out of the world's email systems.

Good: Takes active role in legally pursuing spammers.

Bad: Pushes flawed and unwanted opt-out model for anti-spam regulation.

Re:As a aussie

[Kadmos]

As a New Zealander I am surprised that the government is showing this much common sense:

And as an Australian I am suprised that the NZ govt "favoured following Australian legislation".

And that the previously used "common sense" didn't kick in at that point.

nz got it right then

[geraint-nz]

microsoft not liking the nz legislation has got to be the best recommendation for the legislation

Better ways to present check boxes

[jesterzog]

I think one of the problems with this method at the moment is that most organisations don't provide clear information about exactly what someone can expect by checking the box. Often it's buried somewhere deep within the privacy policy, but it's not exactly obvious.

Before I check such a box, I like to be confident that I understand basic things like:

• How frequently I'm likely to receive mail.
• What type of content it will contain. For me, there's a big difference between something like:
  • "Try our cheap trip to Hawaii", and
  • "We've reduced the cost for upgrading to business class. Would you like to do this for the trip that we have you on record as having booked a month ago?"
• How easy it's going to be to get off the list. Ideally I want to know how to get off the list before signing up to it. I also want to have some clear contact information for someone who I can contact if their unsubscription system breaks.
• Who's actually going to be mailing me. Often businesses like to be able to send emails for their "business partners", but I want to know what this means. If it means that they're going to send me any old spam that someone pays them to send me (which is often the case). Basically you go down in their book as an asset after ticking the box, because they can make money off other people by sending you email. I normally won't check the box if there's any doubt about it. But it might mean that every so often, there actually are things that they think I might find useful, and they might want to let me know because of that rather than because someone's paying them. If this is the case, and I trust them, then I might consider signing up.

Most boxes don't actually do this. They just say inane things like "Click here to receive great deals from us and our partners in your email." I'd rather they said something like:

"Click here and we'll keep you informed about deals we have in the future.

"For examples of what you'll receive, check out [this list of some of our past deals]. We'll send about one email a week, and you stop us from sending them whenever you like. ([Click here for more info about how this works.]) We might also send you information from other businesses if we think it's of use to you, but we won't be give them your contact details (without specific permission), or accept money from them to forwarding it."

I guess it's a bit more verbose, but to me it's a hell of a lot clearer and more trustworthy. Then again, I realise that most people don't seem to think/care about this type of thing as much as I do. I'm sure I'm not the main target of many marketing people... I just get annoyed as collateral damage.

Re:Better ways to present check boxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Geesh, you make it so complicated.

Just don't check the freakin' box!

Re:Better ways to present check boxes

[Vadim Makarov]

"For examples of what you'll receive, check out [this list of some of our past deals]. We'll send about one email a week, and you stop us from sending them whenever you like. ([Click here for more info about how this works.]) We might also send you information from other businesses if we think it's of use to you, but we won't be give them your contact details (without specific permission), or accept money from them to forwarding it."

You can shorten this to We'll never send you mass email written right below the field where you type your email address.

Anything else, or the lack of such a clear notice, gets me think twice before I ever register.

How to stay relatively spam free

[dennypayne]

I have hit upon a decent method for not having to wade through a ton of spam in my inbox.

Tools Required:

1. A domain that you administer mail accounts for
2. The ability to define a catch-all account for mail

The method:

I have defined my "regular" email address as the catch-all. Whenever a website requests an email address, I use something unique to that site. The account does not exist, but mail from them will still get delivered to me via the catch-all account.

Example:

I sign up for email for my Hilton account with hilton@mydomain.com. The account is not defined but the catch-all will deliver the mail to me nonetheless.

The benefit:

If I start getting spam to that email address, I now have several options. First, I know who sold or gave out my address so I can hammer them if I choose. Second, I can simply begin filtering everything from that address into a "known spam folder" and never have to deal with it other than to delete the contents of that folder. Third, I can setup nasty autoresponders that mimic bounce messages or something on that account if I wish (I know, this may not be doing much good but it's fun).

By doing this I keep the spam in my inbox down to 2 or 3 messages a day.

Denny

Re:How to stay relatively spam free

[dennypayne]

Well thanks for the feedback, I'm glad to see at least someone will get some use out of this :-)

I don't worry too much about scoring, it seems if you don't post something within an hour or so then the lemmings move on to something else and don't bother to continue to check on a topic to mod decent responses. Oh well...

Denny

Re:How to stay relatively spam free

[Anonymous Coward]

You know where your idea of a catch-all enabled e-mail address will fall? Imagine the spammer running a dictionary attack against your domain: using all words in a dictionary @your-domain.tld. Guess where each of those thousands of e-mails will be delivered in your situation? Right - straight into your e-mail box. Guess how many times a day spammers do dictionary attacs, or just e-mail badly harvested addresses, or even Message-IDs? And all that garbage will be delivered to your e-mail box. A spammer's dream...

Besides, filtering after receiving e-mails is already too late to reduce the damage - the spam was already delivered to your inbox and stored there, before the filter can kick in - so the space and the bandwidth were already wasted. Why you insist on creating a catch-all address, and using invalid but not created addresses as tagged ones? Why not just create the address when needed, and if you want to stop receiving anything to it - just remove it from the list of valid addresses! No need to catch any of invalid addresses, no need to accept invalid e-mails, no need to filter afterwards... It will just bounce as "User unknown".

Re:How to stay relatively spam free

[dennypayne]

So, you would have me ignore the real-world fact that my method has worked well for over a year, just in case your hypothetical (possible, but hypothetical) scenario were to occur? That would require me to not only create the account on the email server every time I want to sign up for something, but then go to my email client and configure it to receive the account as well.

Of course you are correct that your scenario could happen. The likelihood of it happening is in my opinion slim enough that the management effort incurred by combating it is not worth my time. When you live in the real world, you have to make tradeoffs such as these.

Denny

Re:How to stay relatively spam free

[Anonymous Coward]

That would require me to not only create the account on the email server every time I want to sign up for something,

Your method requires creation of filtering rules when you want to disable accounts. Doubtfully less involving than just adding or removing a name into the aliases file.

but then go to my email client and configure it to receive the account as well.

Ever heard of aliases? You can create as many names as you want, and alias them all to be delivered to just one box, which you can check with your e-mail client. No extra configuration is required.

When you live in the real world, you have to make tradeoffs such as these.

When you live in real world, cases like one below happen every other day. E-mail admins stopped to use catch-all addresses YEARS ago, precisely because of such abuses. Your method will give people a lot more of headaches to try to clean up after a dictionary attack against their domains, than it will help them to deal with their daily spam loads. Tell me, how often do you have to create a new tagged address, so it's such a burden to add one line to your aliases file? How often do you sign up to new e-mailing lists? And how adding a new filtering rule afterwards when you want to stop that address to deliver is less of a burden than creating a valid address? Keep in mind, your filtering rules will grow bigger and bigger, and they work on *each* e-mail you receive, causing more and more load on the CPU, too, just to process e-mails. If you want some real protection, and you control your mailserver, then you should use blocklists, like Spamhaus ( http://www.spamhaus.org/ ), SPEWS (http://www.spews.org/ ), block entire countries that are spam cesspools and do not care, like China or Korea, and use your own local blocklist where you can add ISPs that refuse to deal with their spammers who keep bothering you, but are not listed in public blocklists above. That way you can have a pretty manageable 3-5 spams a day (if your e-mail addresses are well-exposed to such places as Usenet or web where spammers harvest their addresses most), or maybe even one-two a week (if you don't show your e-mail addresses too much).

And here is the real life example where your advice fails:

Aug 3 13:27:59 orca sendmail[3984]: j73ARuat003984: [vh@mydomain.tld]... User unknown
Aug 3 13:27:59 orca sendmail[3989]: j73ARuGB003989: [vi@mydomain.tld]... User unknown
Aug 3 13:27:59 orca sendmail[3985]: j73ARuGO003985: [vg@mydomain.tld]... User unknown
Aug 3 13:27:59 orca sendmail[3987]: j73ARu20003987: [vm@mydomain.tld]... User unknown
Aug 3 13:27:59 orca sendmail[3984]: j73ARuat003984: [vn@mydomain.tld]... User unknown
[SEVERAL THOUSANDS OF OTHER REFUSED DICTIONARY ATTACK ADDRESSES SNIPPED]
Aug 3 13:32:41 orca sendmail[4184]: j73AW2eP004184: [iqr@mydomain.tld]... User unknown
Aug 3 13:32:41 orca sendmail[4191]: j73AW3LQ004191: [iqs@mydomain.tld]... User unknown
Aug 3 13:32:41 orca sendmail[4188]: j73AW3lL004188: [iqm@mydomain.tld]... User unknown

Re:How to stay relatively spam free

[dennypayne]

Tell me, how often do you have to create a new tagged address, so it's such a burden to add one line to your aliases file? How often do you sign up to new e-mailing lists?

Almost never. I not only use this method for lists, but for website logins. And so far I've never had to actually create an account to disable that came from one of those. I have only done it once where a spammer used a non-existant account from my domain to send spam and I got a small spate of bounce messages. So I wouldn't have gotten the bounce messages, big deal.

And how adding a new filtering rule afterwards when you want to stop that address to deliver is less of a burden than creating a valid address? Keep in mind, your filtering rules will grow bigger and bigger, and they work on *each* e-mail you receive, causing more and more load on the CPU, too, just to process e-mails.

Again, in over a year of using the catch-all account, I have never had to actually put this into practice. I have the option of doing so, which is good enough for me. The management burden of my method is still much less than the approach you advocate, and I continue to dispute, based on my experience, that your assertion that this "happens every other day" is valid.

If you want some real protection, and you control your mailserver, then you should use blocklists, like Spamhaus ( http://www.spamhaus.org/ ), SPEWS (http://www.spews.org/ ), block entire countries that are spam cesspools

I never suggested that you couldn't also use other controls in parallel. My (hosted) mail server runs SpamAssasin, which I believe uses blocklists as well as other methods (I don't admin the whole server but I can manage my hosted account on it).

Denny

Maybe...

[w.timmeh]

...but choosing New Zealand English never seemed to have any effect. Words similar to "colour" would still be 'corrected', and "colonisation" and the like would gain a 'z' instead of the 's'.
Perhaps they've fixed that since, I wouldn't know.

I don't know if you're a kiwi either, but I would guess not... we don't spell 'recognised' the way you have. American spelling is being perpetuated in generations of New Zealand children, thanks in part to Office (but more particularly by the saturation of American culture).

Microsoft may be entitled to comment on the proceedings of our government, but I do not see why one company (particularly one that is to all intents and purposes a foreign multinational corporation) should be able to sway our elected representatives' decision on what is in our best interests! Neither should McDonalds, or Fonterra, or Telecom.

-----
News - NZ election to be held two days before International Speak Like a Pirate day.
Coincidence? I think not.

Re:Maybe...

[treff89]

Could not agree more. All the Americanisations (note the 's') in today's Aus/NZ society are becoming quite sad and repetitive. On that note, w.timmeh, try utilising (again, note the 's') the GB English and the Australian English settings in Worried or OOo: or, basically, English(The rest of the world).

Constitutional right.

[www.sorehands.com]

They have a constitutional right to send your 6 year old daughter ads for penis enlargment pills.

Re:Once I signed up for Hot Mail... got spam inste

[Jafar00]

That's funny. I signed up for a hotmail account just to hold my Spams. I use it whenever my email address is required to register at webpages when I am not sure about their intentions with my email address. My hotmail spam trapper is bulging at the seams with spamminess these days!

Apparently...

[Greyfox]

Someone's not getting enough spam. I suggest that he should have his address added to every spam list on the planet, one at a time, until he no longer feels that spam won't require drastic measures to solve...

The New Zealand common sense

[Funksaw]

expands to just about every aspect of governance. Sure, a few missteps but not the rampant stupidity and corruption that we have here. I like it so much, I'm moving there. But it's difficult. In order to move there, I need to save up money, in order to save up money, I need a job. Jobs are scarse here (and I have an M.A.!) and there's no guarantee I can make -rent- let alone save for NZ. However, once I *get* to NZ, the job market is much, much better. So I'm in catch-22 mode. Anyone got $4200NZ they could let me have?

Re:The New Zealand common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll give you it (cough) if you tell Bill Gates to keep his fucking head out of NZ law making.

If Gates makes to make law, then he can stand as a MP in NZ, until then, he can get fucked.

Re:Once I signed up for Hot Mail... got spam inste

[flonker]

Try Mailinator. It's perfect for those disposable email addresses. There is no link to you other than an IP in an apache log file. (Most disposable email address providers require an email address to forward your mail to.)

Bullshit

[Moraelin]

"Why should they change their web sites because of idiots?"

Yes, because their higher level managers were idiots who wanted to spam in the first place. Otherwise they wouldn't have "opted you in" by default. (Read: shanghaied into a spam database. Being added by default is _not_ "opt in".)

At any rate, I fail to see why I'd have to protect them from their own idiocy. If they were idiotic enough to spam in the first place, just having to change their web site isn't even much of a punishment. So they can just get to it.

"remember they are out to make a profit and not to force you into some moral high ground."

Yes, and thieves, muggers and burglars are out to make a profit too, but that doesn't mean we have to tolerate them. And throwing bricks through people's windows would be an outstanding way to make a profit for someone selling glass panes, but we sure as hell don't have to tolerate that. And scratching people's cars would be an outstanding way to drum up business for shops that can paint them back, but we don't allow that. And dumping chemicals into rivers is a _great_ way to bump up your profits, by not needing to buy filters and/or safely store toxic stuff. Needless to say, we don't allow that. Etc.

So the "but they're out to make a profit" isn't a blanket excuse for any sociopathic behaviour. If someone's making a profit comes at the expense of annoying millions of others, _and_ polluting a common resource, it is perfectly reasonable to ask them to stop.

And if they don't want to, we'll vote laws that make them stop. Believe it or not, most of us live in a "democracy". (Well, except for the USA, which seems mostly run by corporations and getting the laws that the corporations want. E.g., CAN-SPAM. I'm not sure what the term for that is. "Oligarhy" maybe?)

There is no ammendment that says a corporation has a sacred right to make a profit, by whatever means they can think of, no matter how detrimental to the country or people. And if there was, we'd repel it.

A corporation has to live by the rules set by society, and hopefully for the good of society. If one turns into a predator that causes only harm in its quest for more profits, then it no longer fits the reason why we let it exist in the first place, and it should be stopped. It's that simple.

"Opt out or quit bitching."

Get a fucking clue _and_ quit bitching.

This is what RSS was created for.

[inmate]

There is *absolutely* no reason to send marketing material via Email anymore - we now have the perfect vehicle for such communications. RSS

It is easy to use, fully user-controlled and all users subscribed to your feed really are interested in what you have say/sell. Otherwise, they would not be subscribed.
It really is the best of all worlds - Marketing is gauranteed an interested audience. Users have an opt-in system. Admins don't have to worry about mail deluges, inboxs filling up, etc.

Anyone who advocating an Opt-Out Email 'Marketing Vehicle' has no interest in a 'best-for-all' solution, but rather 'best-for-me'.

Let's leave zeralotry aside

[Moraelin]

"Do you run Windows? do you or have you ever have a bot using your email address, do friends that you have given you email address to run Windows? Security holes in Windows + baggage may be part of your problem."

Well, I don't know about him, but let me tell you that _I_ don't even have my email address stored anywhere on my computer. I don't actually use any email client or address book there that a bot could scan. The only access I use is web access through HTTPS, and with Mozilla not IE.

So not only I've never had a bot on my machine, but even if (ad absurdum) one managed to get on it, it wouldn't actually find that email address anywhere on it. Did that stop me from getting spam? Nope.

I also have co-workers that are on various flavours of BSD and still get spam. (Tangent: you know Linux must be making some nice progress, when you see some people moving _away_ from Linux because it's getting too mainstream for them.)

But let's get back to a piece of that quote which is the real problem:

"do friends that you have given you email address to run Windows?"

So there's this miracle solution that would work only if everyone in the world switched to another OS. Heh. Then it's just not a solution, is it?

So I'd need to do... what, to stop receiving spam? Convince at least two different corporations to 100% migrate to Linux, plus get a whole bunch of people converted even though they have _zero_ use or need for Linux? It's just not a realistic goal, and frankly is an even worse waste of my time than spam is.

"'legitimate' spam is still pretty much the same as other advertising mediums."

Bullshit. There is no such thing as "legitimate spam". Now maybe it's the same as junk mail, but sure as hell not as normal advertising.

Normal advertising works in that it pays for some service provided to me, and which I (individually or some group I belong to) opted in for. E.g., if I visit a web site with advertising banners, I've explicitly made a choice to tolerate those in exchange for the content they pay for. E.g., if I watch a TV station and get 5 minutes of ads every 15 minutes, again, I've decided to tolerate those in exchange for the content they pay for. In either case I can turn the TV off or close the browser, and stop getting those right there and then.

Even with billboards, the community basically decided to use those for funds instead of extra taxes. If enough people decided that they don't want those -- like the people of NZ decided they don't want spam -- they could get the mayor's office to remove them.

Spam doesn't pay for anything, and there was no such "opt-in" involved in getting it in the first place.

Saying that that's like normal advertising, is like saying that picking someone's pocket is no different from normal commerce. Well, no. Normal commerce included other key elements, like being consentual, and like not being a unilateral affair. Normal commerce isn't just me giving money to someone, it's also getting something in return, and having the free choice whether I want to do it or not. The moment you take those key elements away, it just becomes something else.

The same applies to spam. I can see why spammers try to muddy the distinction, but a distinction it still is. If it's sorta like normal advertising... except it's not consensual, and doesn't give you anything in return for tolerating it, then it's just _not_ normal advertising.

Re:Let's leave zeralotry aside

[oliverthered]

Bullshit. There is no such thing as "legitimate spam". Now maybe it's the same as junk mail, but sure as hell not as normal advertising.

Normal advertising works in that it pays for some service provided to me.....

Which normal advertising? Does the kiNe tick pay for peoples footwear, help keep people working in third world countries in well payed jubs with good working conditions or does it go into the pockets of the kiNe coporation?

What about product placement in films, do all those shots of krapples pay for the file? my every so comfey seat, less DRM on films or joe blogs £50 Million pay packet for playing the lead role?

And most billboards I've seen have nothing to do with helping out the community and everything to do with putting money into the pocket of one person/company.

etc.....
You've completely narrowed down your perspective on advertising to the point where you cannot see that other forms of advertising are often just as intrusive, offensive etc... as spamm, so why only target spam and not all forms of unsolicited advertising?

Re:Once I signed up for Hot Mail... got spam inste

[b00le]

...never told a sole about it...

Ah - but did you perhaps tell a flounder?

Re:Once I signed up for Hot Mail... got spam inste

[benji fr]

I once signed up for a Hot Mail Account, years ago and never used it,

Please don't forget that hotmail.com (as many other well-known domains) receive many spam from so-called "dictionnary attack" : the spammer try every email starting at "a" and going through to "zzzzzzzzzz" ... It's not that hard for them, and as the famous hotmail.com domains grow, they can touch more and more users.

what BS

[suezz]

"The US executive charged with leading Microsoft's global drive against spam and phishing frauds paid a flying visit to Wellington last week to try to talk the Government out of passing its proposed anti-spam bill in its current form.

Microsoft's Technology Care and Safety Group, headed by Ryan Hamlin, is celebrating a blow against spam in the US after securing a $US7 million settlement from former spammer Scott Richter, who Mr Hamlin describes as the third largest spammer in the US, responsible for sending out more than 20 billion spam messages in just one year.

However, he says the New Zealand Government's Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill is "too broad" and could impinge on "the amazing vehicle of e-mail marketing".

Mr Hamlin says Microsoft would like to see the bill changed so that businesses could be confident they could continue to use databases that they had already compiled to send out e-mail. "

and there you have the source of spam. If microsoft the os choice for idiots says some spam is okay because it is legit so please don't pass this law.

bullshit - I want no spam and no marketing crap. just fuck off microsoft and stay out of government. I don't want any sales crap in my mail. Keep your corporation bullshit to yourself.

Re:Once I signed up for Hot Mail... got spam inste

[b0bby]

On the other hand, I have a hotmail account that I set up two years ago, with a name that's unlikely to appear in any dictionary attack, and I still get absolutely no spam on that account. I don't trust MS, but I don't think they're selling hotmail names.

Re:Once I signed up for Hot Mail... got spam inste

[mwg_stpaul]

Oh, well played, sir. Bravo.

kitten hazard

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news today, Microsoft executives report that dipping your balls in sweet cream and squatting in a kitchen full of kittens may be hazardous to your health.

Hazardous? Sounds like a good time to me. Matter of fact with enough kittens it sounds like an "Xtreme" good time. We should get some athletes to endorse it, while drinking Mountain Dew.

You're assuming he has any nuts.

[NetworkImpossible]

What does the evidence show?

1. He's a marketroid

2. For Microsoft.

Now, where are we going to kick him? Better yet someone should get hold of his cell phone number and we should call him around the clock to thank him for the spam.

But only once each. After all, he's cool with that.

HUGE difference between real junk mail and spam !

[javaxman]

why is spam any worse than traditional junk mail?

Because in most cases, I can stop a marketer from sending me junk mail.

The postal service controls and regulates bulk mail. The business and sending address are almost always known- if they're sending true bulk-rate mail, the sending business and address is known with certainty. If they send stuff and you ask them not to, but they keep sending it, they can be taken to court, have to pay your court costs, fines, damages, etc. Even the 'evil' direct marketing association runs a service to keep you off of their lists, which, though voluntary, supposedly does help keep the volume down - partly because bulk mailing costs enough that they don't want to send mail to people who will just toss it without opening it, really.

The mail is heavily regulated, and costs a fair amount to use. Sure, I get lots of junk mail. But it's nothing compared to the volume of spam, and if I want to stop the junk mail, it can, in fact, be done to a very large extent, with the post office and marketers themselves often helping assist you. Asking spammers to stop sending you spam, on the other hand, just gets you more spam...

I started this thinking there'd be just one reason junk mail is so different from spam, but it turns out there are a lot of reasons, important reasons, especially when combined with the very very very low cost of sending spam and the high cost of trying to filter it out. Honestly, if all spam was just marked "BULK" or something in the subject, I wouldn't mind quite so much, although it'd still be a 'receiver-pays' system...

Re:HUGE difference between real junk mail and spam

[oliverthered]

'The postal service controls and regulates bulk mail. The business and sending address are almost always known- if they're sending true bulk-rate mail, the sending business and address is known with certainty'

Wouldn't the answer then be to categorize spam along with bulk snail-mail so that is falls under the same legislation instead of making up new laws for the hell of it?

Spam isn't really a 'receiver-pays' system, the sender pays to send the span and the storage cost etc... of spam isn't that high (a 250GB HDD costs?) I would argue that it also takes more of my time to deal with snail-mail than it does to deal with spam weighting the costs of general junk mail in the direction of the receiver.

Oh please

[Moraelin]

Yes, lemming. Those ads did pay for a part of the movie you watch, or for a part of your city's funds. (Which otherwise would have had to come out of your taxes.) The road you drive your car to work, surprise, might have been paved with money earned out of selling ad space.

Somewhere there was a negotiated contract. A _bilateral_ affair. A sale-purchase affair. _That_ is what makes it different from spam, and that is why we tolerate them.

Product placement in a movie, yes, was a negotiated affair and they paid a part of making that movie. It wasn't just someone sneaking cans of Coke or replacing the shoes with Nikes until one got on camera. They actually negotiated that placement and paid for it.

Ads on billboards, again, someone paid something to the city for that. Nike or whatever didn't just drop by and start hammering their own billboards all over the place. They negotiated space on those billboards and paid for it.

If you can can't tell the difference between "unsolicited" and "sale", then you have a problem.

That's why we tolerate them, lemming. Because they pay for something in return. If billboards just got put there as unilaterally as spam happens, yes, we'd vote a law against those too.

No, it doesn't have to 100% pay for all seats, eliminate world hunger, and remove DRM, or whatever. You're arguing... what? That if something's not 100% altruistic and perfect (e.g., yeah, it paid for a part of the movie, but it didn't also remove DRM and make all tickets free), then there's no difference between that and something that's 100% plunder and annoyance? Geesh.

Re:Oh please

[oliverthered]

'somewhere there was a negotiated contract. A _bilateral_ affair. A sale-purchase affair. _That_ is what makes it different from spam, and that is why we tolerate them.'

And spammers don't pay for their internet connection, didn't sign a contract and don't help pay for the infrastructure of the internet?

Maybe billboards pay for the roads in the US but in the UK the money goes to the owner of the building or plot of land where the billboard is placed, the owner is taxed just like any other company. The owner is required to get permission from the local government to put the billboard up in the first place and the adds have to be U/E rated, but the same advertising laws can already be used against spammers.

I think your the lemming, and a blind one at that. 'legitimate' spammers the ones that pay for their connection and don't send out adds that violate trading standards are already covered to some extent by existing advertising laws and the ones that don't pay for their internet connection and use zombies to send out their spam are illegal under hacking laws and if no ones stopping them now then no one ever will.

'yeah, it paid for a part of the movie', no more than spam paid for part of the spammers (and therefore your) internet connection.