Spam

Oklahoma Anti-Spammer Loses Big in Court

In November, Mark Mumma, who runs a little design firm at webguy.com, lost an appeal in the Fourth Federal Circuit. He'd filed suit against cruise.com and their parent Omega World Travel under CAN SPAM and an Oklahoma anti-spam law. Omega countersued for defamation. The court threw out Mumma's case, and allowed part of the defamation case to proceed. At first blush, this looks like a big win for spammers.

P2P as a New Spam Medium, Moving From PoC to Full Operations

Spam on P2P networks used to be mainly with advertising inside downloaded movies and pictures (mainly pornographic in nature), as well as by hiding viruses and other malware in downloaded warez and most any other file type (from zip archives to movie files). Further, P2P networks were in the past used for harvesting by spammers. Today, P2P has become a direct to customer spamvertizing medium. This has been an ongoing change for a while. As we speak, it is moving from a proof of concept trial to a full spread of spam, day in, day out...

Dog Eats Opt-Out Requests, FTC Is Not Impressed

Last week the Federal Trade Commission settled a lawsuit against Yesmail, a large ESP (Email Service Provider). The facts of the case are not in dispute, but their meaning is. Yesmail, like most large ESPs, has absorbed a number of its smaller competitors over the years including a company called @Once. Back in 2004, they screwed up their incoming mail so that a whole lot of bounces and opt-out requests were erroneously filtered out as spam. As a result, thousands of people who'd told @Once to stop sending them mail kept getting mail anyway...

More than 99% of Email is Spam?

One of my pet peeves is the headline "n %" of email is spam, it is inherently misleading, and conveys no useful data. I guess it makes for great newspaper headlines then! On our servers looking at one email address for 4 hours, we saw 208 attempted connections for SMTP traffic referring to this email address. ...One can't measure spam in relation to the amount of genuine email, because the amount of genuine email is not connected to the amount of spam...

Huge Increase in Spam in October Email

You may have read reports that the total amount of spam is on the decline. Don't believe them. In the month of October, I saw the amount of spam in my traps here roughly double, from about 50,000 per day to 100,000/day now. In conversations with managers at both ISPs and corporate networks, I'm hearing the same thing.

Lessons for the Internet Governance Forum from the IETF

As Antonios Broumas has correctly observed, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) begins life in Athens next week without the means for its participants to agree upon any substantive documents such as resolutions or declarations. Indeed, according to Nitin Desai, the Chairman of its Advisory Group, it is impossible for the IGF to make any decisions, as it "is not a decision-making body. We have no members so we have no power to make decision."...

What If .COM Had Been Born With Site Finder?

ICANN's new Registry Service Technical Evaluation Service (RSTEP) process is definitely a positive step forward for ICANN. The comment period for the Tralliance proposed new service using the DNS wildcard feature closed Wednesday night. ...Ken Fockler commented "there are no right answers and no wrong answers, just judgments and decisions made on those judgments." In this light, I would be interested in hearing different perspectives on the following questions...

False Positives and Ignorance

Content inspection is a poor way to recognise spam, and the proliferation of image spam recently drums this home. However if one must use these unreliable techniques, one should bring mathematical rigour to the procedure. Tools like SpamAssassin combine content inspection results, with other tests, in order to tune rule-sets to give acceptable rates of false positives (mistaking genuine emails for spam), and thus end up assigning suitable weights to different content rules. If one is going to use these approaches to filtering spam, and some see it as inevitable, one better know one's statistics...

Spamming the News Cycle: Spamhaus Non-Story Goes Viral

Google News now shows more than 300 stories about Spamhaus, most about a proposed court order following a district court default judgment. To me, the most interesting is the meta-story -- why the non-event of a proposed order has the blogs scrambling with claims of constitutional crisis and even the notoriously close-lipped ICANN issuing an announcement "in response to community interest expressed on this topic."

ICANN Issues a Statement on the Spamhaus Case

ICANN issued a statement on the Spamhaus case: "...ICANN is not a party to this action and no order has been issued in this matter requiring any action by ICANN. Additionally, ICANN cannot comply with any order requiring it to suspend Spamhaus.org..."