| Vole throws book at German porn spammer
A GERMAN PORN SPAMMER has been found guilty by Karlsruhe's Intermediate Court of Appeals and is being ordered to pay damage and stop sending unwanted advert e-mails, reports heise online. The accused spamster has been charged with conducting spam campaigns over six months, mainly advertising his own prawn site. Vole's particularly miffed at the bloke because he forged e-mail addresses from Hotmail in some of his spam. If he carries on sending out spam he'll face a 250,000 euro penalty. Thee Vole is also demanding information about his advertising campaigns, as well as payment for damages. This is a landmark case in that, in Germany, spammers could only be taken to civil court and charged with "unfair competition," says Heise online. ยต .
Microsoft wins case against German pornographer for using Hotmail
Technology giant Microsoft Corp. won a court case against a German man accused of forging e-mail that appeared to come from Microsoft's hotmail.com e-mail address. This is the first case in Germany, a country without spam laws, in which an unsolicited e-mailer has been fined. The regional appeals court in Karlsruhe found the unnamed party guilty of sending unsolicited mail and using Microsoft's trademark-protected Hotmail brand without the company's permission. The sender was sending unsolicited e-mails to promote the undisclosed pornographic site for several months. He was ordered to stop the mailing of e-mails using the Hotmail brand as well as told to pay a fine of more than $318,000. In addition, the spammer must provide Microsoft with detailed information about his e-mail promotional activities.
Stop Spam Now with Spam Container v3
Spam Container has released the latest version of their spam blocker software, Spam Container v3 for Windows. This software can be used with any email system including Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. Spam Container v3 also gives you the ability to receive your Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, GMail and many more web mail accounts in your email application instead of your web browser. London UK (PRWEB) October 7, 2006 -- Spam Container has released the latest version of their spam blocker software, Spam Container v3 for Windows. This software can be used with any email system including Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. Spam Container v3 also gives you the ability to receive your Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, GMail and many more web mail accounts in your email application instead of your web browser.
Google's Gmail Improves Spam Detection, MSN Hotmail Lags Behind
Only 3% of of opt-in e-mails were treated as spam by Gmail, according to a new report from Lyris, a maker of e-mail marketing software. That's a 15-fold improvement in performance compared to when Gmail launched in 2004.
The Lyris report also notes that: MSN Hotmail has improved its false-positive spam detection, but remains high (18.2% this quarter vs. 23.4% the previous quarter).European ISPs are better than American ISPs at filtering out false-positives. Compuserve and iwon.com aggressively filter spam, leading to a high rate of false positives. From the New York Times (which doesn't note the Hotmail stats):
In its latest quarterly test, Lyris tracked more than 57,000 e-mail messages, sent from 57 different businesses and nonprofit organizations to scores of e-mail addresses it owns in many different domains.
E-mail Disrupted on Friday
Thousands of spam messages were sent using compromised Athena accounts early in the morning on Friday, Oct. 6, delaying some outgoing mail delivery. Network administrators discovered the intrusion when they noticed that the server responsible for outgoing authenticated mail was under unusually high load late at night. They found the e-mail server attempting to deliver thousands of spam messages. As a result of the intrusion, the server responsible for outgoing authenticated mail was put on a number of blacklists, including spamcop.net, listing servers known to send spam, according to Jeffrey I. Schiller '79, the network manager for Information Services & Technology. Other e-mail services like Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail use such blacklists to automatically reject incoming mail coming from e-mail servers known to be sending spam.
False Positives and Ignorance
Content inspection is a poor way to recognise spam, and the proliferation of image spam recently drums this home. However if one must use these unreliable techniques, one should bring mathematical rigour to the procedure. Tools like SpamAssassin combine content inspection results, with other tests, in order to tune rule-sets to give acceptable rates of false positives (mistaking genuine emails for spam), and thus end up assigning suitable weights to different content rules. If one is going to use these approaches to filtering spam, and some see it as inevitable, one better know one's statistics, or trust the folk who write SpamAssassin to have good default rules. Most people are not good at statistics, so guess what they do? The default rules in SpamAssassin carry a lot of weight in the world of spam.
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