Australian regulators have signed an agreement with Asia-Pacific nations to step up the war against spam.
Twelve Asia-Pacific communications and Internet agencies have joined the Australian Communications Authority in signing a memorandum of understanding -- the Seoul-Melbourne Anti-Spam Agreement --on cooperation in countering spam.
There's a new strategy in the spam battle: Call it containment.
Filters for blocking junk e-mail from inboxes have improved to the point that doing much more will needlessly kill legitimate e-mail, said Carl Hutzler, America Online Inc.'s anti-spam coordinator. So e-mail gatekeepers are shifting gears.
Now they're getting more aggressive at keeping spam from leaving their systems in the first place.
EarthLink Inc., for instance, is phasing in a requirement that customers' mail programs submit passwords before it will send out their e-mail.
There's a new strategy in the spam battle: Call it containment.
Filters for blocking junk e-mail from inboxes have improved to the point that doing much more will needlessly kill legitimate e-mail, said Carl Hutzler, America Online's antispam coordinator. So e-mail gatekeepers are shifting gears.
Now they're getting more aggressive at keeping spam from leaving their systems in the first place.
EarthLink, for instance, is phasing in a requirement that customers' mail programs submit passwords before it will send out their e-mail.
We're not any less annoyed by spam. We're just more accepting of it.
So says a study released Sunday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Fifty-three percent of adult e-mail users in the United States now say they trust e-mail less because of spam, down from 62 percent a year ago and about the same as a June 2003 Pew survey.
Pew also found that 22 percent of e-mail users say they are spending less time on e-mail because of spam, down from 29 percent last year. In 2003, it was 25 percent.
The days of mobile spammers are numbered as the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) issued the rules and regulations on broadcast messaging services.
The rules were crafted after a series of consultations and a hearing attended by telecom service providers, content providers and other interested parties in response to numerous consumer complaints received by NTC.
Under the rules, NTC has adopted the "opt-in regime" where it is prohibited to send unsolicited commercial messages or spam by SMS or MMS unless the subscriber has given permission or consent.
IBM unveiled a service Tuesday that sends unwanted e-mails back to the spammers who sent them.
The new IBM (Research) service, known as FairUCE, essentially uses a giant database to identify computers that are sending spam. E-mails coming from a computer on the spam database are sent directly back to the computer, not just the e-mail account, that sent them.
"Spam has become a high priority security issue for businesses today," Stuart McIrvine, IBM's director of corporate security strategy, said in a prepared statement.
European and Asian countries agreed to unite in the fight against spam at the conclusion of an ecommerce conference in London this week. Government participants attending an Asia-Europe (ASEM) conference on ecommerce issued a joint statement pledging to tackle the junk mail menace.
Due to human error, a spam e-mail sent to MSNBC.com was inadvertently and mistakenly distributed to our breaking-news subscriber list early Wednesday.
User information and e-mail addresses of our users were not compromised, and MSNBC.com is re-evaluating the safeguards on its e-mail alert system.
The latest version of Send-Safe, the notorious bulk-mailing software used by many spammers, has a feature that renders the "blacklist" strategy used by email filtering companies obsolete.
Using the blacklist strategy, all emails from a computer known to send out spam are blocked before they reach internet service providers' systems. Most of these emails come from infected PCs - called "zombies" - controlled by the spammers. Send-Safe, however, now disguises the origin of emails to make it seem like they are coming from the zombie's ISP instead of the infected machine.
The UK manufacturing sector is being particularly severely hit by the rising global tide of unsolicited spam emails, research has claimed.
According to figures released by managed email firm MessageLabs, more than four out of every five emails received by manufacturing firms over the past year were spam.
But the study found that viruses were the biggest problem among not-for-profit and healthcare organisations, where one in every six emails contained malicious content.
