Spam

A man who sent 850 million junk e-mails through accounts he opened with stolen identities was sentenced to up to seven years in prison on Thursday. Atlanta-based Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. said it hoped the sentence and an earlier $16.4 million civil judgment against Howard Carmack will deter other spammers. "Before spammers send one more spam e-mail, we think they should remember that what happened to Howard Carmack can happen to them," said Karen Casion, Earthlink's assistant general counsel.

The Bobax worm, which is less than a week old but has already spawned four variants, is one of the first worms to conduct a bandwidth test on its infected host to see if it is worthy of being used as a spam zombie.

A survey of IT security professionals conducted at the Infosecurity show in London this week revealed that more than 80 percent of people do not think that Bill Gates' pledge to eliminate spam within two years is realistic.

In June 2003, the Microsoft chairman called for cooperation between government and corporations to fight the spammers. But Gates was branded hypocritical by anti-spam organizations because they said that Microsoft was only focusing on reducing the amount of spam received, rather than the spam sent by its users and servers.

Spammers who get caught flooding American inboxes with junk mail could find themselves facing prosecution twice -- once at the federal level and once at the state level -- thanks to a largely overlooked clause in the U.S. Can-Spam Act.

Legislation passed last year to clamp down on U.K. companies that send unsolicited e-mail over the Internet is unlikely to result in any prosecutions until 2005.
The Information Commissioner's Office, which applies the Privacy and Electronic Communication regulations, said that it needs stronger powers to act against suspected transgressors. Without these additional sanctions, companies are free to continue sending email over the Internet while they are investigated--a process that can take many months.

Australia's Spam Act, which will become law on April 11, may be designed to stop spammers but it is also likely to catch legitimate businesses selling their products and services online.

Clearswift Asia Pacific managing director Chy Chuawiwat said at a Spam Forum today "chances are that the Spam Act will catch some legitimate business people unaware that they are breaking the new law and fines can be hefty for breaches."

Spam that targets instant-messaging users is on the rise, but analysts say the problem won't be as disruptive as unsolicited e-mail.

As spammers face legal action from the Can-Spam Act, they are expected to turn their efforts to sending unwanted messages via instant messaging, a technology that allows users to send messages to each other over the Internet in real time.

After nearly ruining the usefulness of email with billions of spams, unscrupulous marketers are now turning their attention to instant messaging (IM).

In recent weeks, several reports have been released detailing the emergence of spim, or spam-laden instant messages. The numbers vary, but one thing is clear, spim is making inroads and it won't be long before it hits millions of IM windows worldwide.

Four major Internet service providers said Wednesday that they have filed a series of lawsuits meant to shut down a number of leading senders of unsolicited junk e-mail, or spam.

The suits, which are seeking monetary damages and injunctions against further mass e-mail messages, are among the first to invoke the new federal anti-spam law, which went into effect Jan. 1.

As spam-fighting tools become increasingly aggressive, e-mail recipients risk losing newsletters and promotions they've requested.

A new study attempts to quantify missed bulk mailings. Return Path, a company that monitors e-mail performance for online marketers, found that nearly 19 percent of e-mail sent by its customers never reached the inboxes of intended recipients.

The figure, for the last half of 2003, is up 3.7 percentage points from the same period in 2002.