Spam Clock Ticking For Bill Gates
from the friendly-reminders dept
At the end of January 2004, Bill Gates was talking about tackling spam and said that within two years, it would be "solved". We checked in earlier this year, and he didn't seem to have made much of an impact, and it certainly doesn't look like spam's going anywhere. So, hopefully ol' Bill's got a lot of free time over the holidays, because he's got 36 days to stop spam. Somebody put the coffee on for him.


Reader Comments
(Flattened / Threaded)
Microsoft IS spam
Bill Gates CAN make a huge impact on SPAM in a short amount of time!
Shutdown msn hotmail! Earlier today I checked an IP address on a scamspam wanting to give me a few million $$$...
The address was registered to Microsoft and had been blacklisted several times in the past month, the most recent being today!
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Re: Microsoft IS spam
What is is that you say? People really do not want "free" viagra? :P
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Re: Microsoft IS spam
And all this time I thought it was targeted advertising.
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Re: Microsoft IS spam
Targeted to Humans. That's about as defined as it gets.
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Re: Microsoft IS spam
By the way, very little of the 'spam' that has a 'From' of hotmail.com actually goes through microsoft-owned servers.
It's all 'forged' email going through open relays, usually in foreign countries like China. The spammers use free mail systems like hotmail and yahoo to collect feedback, or more likely, to never check but have something valid-looking for the recieving mail server. Hotmail has about as much power to do anything about this as you do to stop a Volcano in Asia from erupting.
I used to work anti-spam for WebTV. We'd occasionally see reports of WebTV boxes 'spamming', but since they aren't actually running a commercial OS (like a windows), and had no hard drive, it was, to put it mildly, extremely difficult to actually send spam from one of these in any sort of bulk fashion. And the messages we did get a hold of were all forged - you can see the actual delivery path in the full headers.
MS may be one of the most 'evil' companies ever, I wouldn't disagree, but you can't really blame much of the spam problem on them, particularly not the hotmail division.
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No Subject Given
yea, its weird. ive been getting alot of spam on my hotmail latly too. not as much on my Yahoo. None on my .Mac :)
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Not surprisiing
This is not surprising. Microsoft itself spams
(see Usenet's news.admin.net-abuse.email) for
examples; they host thousands of spammer domains
(at MSN); they host tens of thousands of spammer
dropboxes (at Hotmail); and they are one of the backers
of completely idiotic "authentication" schemes
that have zero anti-spam value, and are, of course,
merely thinly-veiled attempts to assert control
over email.
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No Subject Given
*bill gates* QUICK GIVE ME YOUR EMAILS to uh stop spamming...yeah...comon i know you want viagra ;)
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Give Bill a Break
He probably thought 2 years would be enough time for Microsoft to TAKE OVER THE INTERNETS! If he were in complete control he could stop spam. It's all you people's fault for not handing over control of the internets to Bill!!
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NewNetMail - new way to communicate
Hello!!
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by
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