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.


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Comments on “Spam Clock Ticking For Bill Gates”

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10 Comments
danielle says:

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!

Kirby says:

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.

Anonymous Coward says:

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.

dario (user link) says:

NewNetMail - new way to communicate

Hello!!

Introducing the world’s first private email provider. At last – now you can send and receive communications over the internet, but without the problems of traditional email, and if you are in war against Spams Viruses and unwanted mails go to this web address its actualy invitation and you can get it only here ddobosic.newnetmail.com

by

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