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Who are the Earliest Adopters of SPF? Survey says: Spammers!

A survey of nearly 2million pieces of email by security company CipherTrust revealed some interesting facts: 1. Only 5% of the email came from servers which had enabled either SPF or Sender I.D. authentication. 2. Of the email coming from servers with SPF or Sender I.D. enabled, more than half…

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War Spamming War Driver Gets Whacked by CAN-SPAM

Nicholas Tombros has become the first person in U.S. history to be convicted of war spamming – that combination of war driving and spamming.

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Is Your Email Address Safe in the Hands of a Government Agency? Publisher Demands Mailing List from City Council

Now here’s an interesting showdown with potentially far-reaching ramifications. The location: o Mar Vista, a suburb of Los Angeles, California The players: o The Mar Vista Neighborhood Council, a public body of volunteer neighborhood do-gooders, certified by the city as an advisory agency for the city. o The Westmar Sun,…

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“Knock knock” “Who’s there?” “John Ashcroft”

The DOJ followed through with their promised big announcement today of the dozens of spammers, scammers, and just plain Internet nasties they’d whacked since June 1st. Here, from their own press release, is a peek at some of those badies: “Some of the charges filed in districts throughout the country…

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Politics of Spam Makes Strange Bedfellows: The DMA, “Slam Spam”, and the U.S. Justice Department

On a sidenote to the much ballyhooed crackdown by the Justice Department on dozens of spammers, at least part of the funding for the crackdown came through the Direct Marketing Association’s “Operation Slam Spam”. The law under which these stings were made, CAN-SPAM, has been depicted as a win for…

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Revenge of the Spoofed! Trademark Your Domain! Here’s How!

Those good folks over at the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy have a really nifty idea to get back at those pesky spoofers – people who use your domain as the “from” address in their spam. ISIPP is offering a new service with which they will help you…

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I’m Sorry Teacher, the Spam Filter Ate My IPO

Two things are now clear to Aunty about Google’s upcoming IPO: 1) They are moving forward with their somewhat novel concept of making their initial offering directly to individuals, by email, and 2) they are worried about that email being zapped by spam filters. As such, Google and their investment…

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Microsoft to begin checking for SPF with inbound email to Hotmail, MSN

Microsoft has announced that they will begin checking email coming in to Hotmail, MSN and Microsoft.com to determine whether the sending server has published a valid SPF record. The change is to occur on the first of October. It makes sense, given that they have merged their own Caller I.D….

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A Really Bad Idea: Register Your Child’s Email Address with the Michigan or Utah Email Child Protection Registery

As stupid ideas go, this one is a doozy: people have long said that one of the downsides of a Do Not Email Registry is that it would be such an attractive target for spammers. Well how about this one: the states of Michigan and Utah just enacted law to…

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BREAKING NEWS: NY State Attorney General Reaches Settlement With Spam King Scott Richter

In an exclusive story, the Internet Patrol has learned that the New York State Attorney General has reached a settlement with Spam King Scott Richter.

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Breaking News: Court Dismisses SpamCop SLAPP Suit Against Richter

Aunty is still working to confirm this, but a little birdie whispered in her ear that SpamCop’s and parent company Ironport’s SLAPP suit against Scott Richter and his OptInRealBig, in response to Richter’s suit against SpamCop, has been dismissed by the Court. Here’s the history to date: Richter sues SpamCop…

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Joe-Jobbing Can Be Dangerous

Being Joe-Jobbed – or, in normal English, having your email address spoofed in the “From:” line of a spam run – has always been annoying. Now it turns out that it can be dangerous, too. When Charles Booher of Sunnyvale, California kept receiving spam for products to improve and supersize…

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Goverment Recommends “Use a Different Browser” to Combat Internet Explorer’s Security Vulnerabilities

In a move which surely can’t make Microsoft happy, no less an authority than US-CERT (the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) has recommended that one way to deal with the security holes in IE is to “use a different web browser”. In its notice, published this week and entitled…

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Old Spammers Never Die…

In a triumph of stupidity over common sense, William “Billy” Carson has managed to distinguish himself by being the target of one of the first lawsuits by a state District Attorney’s office under CAN-SPAM. Massachusetts is suing Carson for sending “thousands of messages with numerous violations, including misleading subject lines…

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Court Rules that ISPs May Read Customers’ Email Without Their Knowledge

Gentle Readers, This week a United States Court of Appeals in Massachusetts held that an ISP may read a customer’s email without the customer’s knowledge or permission. Yes, you read that right. It is not illegal for an ISP to read its customer’s email, even if they do not have…