The Internet Patrol

We had a really proud moment here this week, when Senator John McCain said, during the Senate Commerce Committee Hearings on the effectiveness of CAN-SPAM to date, “If the FTC can’t find the spammers, it should do the next best thing: go after the businesses that knowingly hire spammers to promote their goods and services…” Senator McCain is referring to Section 6 of CAN-SPAM, which holds those who knowingly advertise in spam responsible just as if they had sent the spam themselves.

Here’s how to detect email spoofing by reading email headers, as well as a tutorial on how to read email headers.

You heard it from Aunty first – well, unless you’ve read the Reuters’ article. According to a Reuters report covering the testimony provided today by noted “Cajun Spammer” Ronnie Scelson to the Senate Commerce Committee, Scelson told the committee that he, and I quote, “has signed up for a “whitelist”…

Noted “Cajun Spammer” Ronnie Scelson, responsible for 30million pieces of spam a day by his own calculations, told the United States Senate Commerce Committee during testimony today that while he has given up his wicked spamming ways, and now complies with CAN-SPAM, if people don’t stop blocking his email he…

A 20-year-old man from Texas has been sentenced to 4 years for phishing, duping both PayPal and AOL customers into thinking that they had received email from those companies, inducing them to provide private information such as credit card and bank account numbers in order to keep their PayPal and…

The issue of “false positives” – good, wanted email being cast aside because it looks too much like spam, comes from a “tainted” IP address, or was simply erroneously reported as spam (and more than one ISP is guilty of making this way too easy for their users) is the bane of the commercial emailer’s existence. Even the purest of mailers now finds that the email they send experiences delivery failures of 5 – 10 – even 20% or more, the lion’s share due to overzealous or even moronic spam-filtering or reporting.

Dear Internet Patrol. I keep getting email which appears to be from PayPal, or from eBay, but which really is from some scammer who seems to be trying to get me to give them my password or account number or credit card number, and not from PayPal or eBay at…

From the “what a novel approach to spamming” department, H & H Enterprises of Foxworth, Mississippi is offering “Mind Gold” to “help businesses attract new prospects and gain the loyalty of existing customers”. The gist of the Mind Gold program is that you subscribe to the Mind Gold e-zine, for…

Outlook 2003 actually contains some fairly nifty built-in anti-spam functions, similar to those found in many of today’s end-user email programs.

In perhaps the most content-free press release which Aunty has ever seen, Scott Richter yesterday crowed about the TRO which was issued against SpamCop in the Richter v. SpamCop case, saying: “A Temporary Restraining Order (“TRO”) was issued today by the United States District Court, the Northern District of California,…

As you might imagine, Aunty got lots of calls from reporters today about the OptInRealBig v. SpamCop TRO. However, one call from a reporter in Washington D.C. took Aunty by surprise. They did not want to talk about Mr. Richter and SpamCop. They wanted to get Aunty’s thoughts on this:…

The United States District Court for the Northern District of California today granted Scott Richter and his company, OptInRealBig, a restraining order against SpamCop and their parent company, Ironport Systems. Richter sued SpamCop less than two weeks ago, claiming that the anti-spam service was hurting his business and interfering with…

Police in Germany have arrested the person they think to be the perpetrator of the Sasser worm. The 18-year-old German high school student is thought to be the creator of the worm which has so far spread through an estimated 18 million computer systems world wide. Sasser’s primary targets are…

Windows users suffering from spam-overloaded inboxes can breathe a little easier thanks to next generation anti-spam products which are easier to use, more effective, and more tightly tuned to stop spam while preserving good email. PC World this week released the results of its extensive survey and testing of nine…

According to public sources, Scott Richter, who is being sued by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, and Microsoft, has stated that he is close to reaching a settlement with Spitzer. On the other hand, he says that talks with Microsoft “haven’t progressed as far”.