Texas and Microsoft Sue Spammers

[mike]

There’s trouble brewing in Texas. Microsoft and the State Attorney General of Texas have filed a suit against University of Texas student Ryan Samuel Pitylak and his partner codefendant Mark Trotter. The pair is accused of setting up multiple shell companies and sending spam emails… lots and lots of spam emails. Microsoft has alleged that they received more than 20,000 spam email messages to spam trap accounts.

According to the Attorney General Greg Abbott, when the shell companies operated by the defendants are combined this dynamic duo actually becomes the 4th largest spamming outfit on the planet. That’s a key statistic of course. It is Texas after all. Even their spammers are bigger than everybody else’s.

[cooper]

Right on!
http://www.internetnews.com/security...le.php/3459591

I love it, this is great. I just hope it has some impact on those that want to step in and take their place.

DOWN WITH SPAM!

[Markll]

Prosecuting high volume spammers is great for headlines but does not address the inreasingly profound impact low volume spammers are having on the internet industry.

Even low volume spam can get an ip blacklisted. This is very bad news for companies that have hosting where an ip is shared. Your hosting neighbor has the potential to shut you down.

I've had the experience of having all my mail to AOL accounts blocked. This was due to somone spamming from the ip address my mail server shares. What's even worse is that this occurred with a prominent hosting company on a premiun mail service Exchange account.

Government and hosting companies need to address this problem soon. Already AOL blocks up to 40% of legitimate mail.

One solution is to require hosting companies and registrars to assume some responiblitiy for domains the service that are involved in even low volume spamming.

[Chief Blogster]

My order confirmations get blocked, I get spam complaints on download information emails (from people who just bought out product) and consumers blam us becuase we didn't reply to customer service issues (and of course, it is in Yahoos junk folder or their spam blocker blocked it).

Consumers do not want spam but most do not understand, (politically correct for - are too stupid) what spam is. People use AOLs spam reporter as an unsubscribe and AOL listens.

Sorry I am fed up with the headaches that this causes business and I do not blame the actual spammers ... I blame the solution. We don't use email as a marketing tool anymore ... even our own customers don't get our offers.

We received a spam complaints from some service to our hosting company and we were tempted to sue the consumer that filed it. Why? They were a customer! Credit card and all. They filed a spam complaint on a followup notice confirming they had no problem installing the product.

Why don't we? Not the money as it would cost me $10K just to sue them. We could destroy some individual as they would have to come to sunny south Florida to defend themselves. We would get enormous press ... "ecommerce company fights back". We don't because it wouldn't get us anywhere and the time it would take out of my day wouldn't be worth the benefit. So instead I periodically post a rant and go on with my day.

Maybe I need to start a spam blog?