Portrait of a Spammer

from Washington Post on 8 Apr 2003
Ruling Backs Anti-Spam Activist
Judge Says Web Site Doesn't Have to Be Taken Down

An Internet site that provides personal information about an alleged purveyor of mass e-mail is not harassment and does not need to be removed, a Maryland district court judge ruled yesterday.

Francis Uy, a tech specialist at Johns Hopkins University, posted the site to expose the activities of George A. Moore Jr., owner of Maryland Internet Marketing Inc. in Linthicum. Moore, whose company sells nutritional weight-loss products, such as Fat-N-Emy and Extreme Colon Cleanser, has been identified by spam-tracking

from "FTC tries to shut down spam e-mail operation":
The Federal Trade Commission said Thursday that after receiving about 46,000 complaints it had asked a federal judge to halt the operation until there can be a trial. It is the first FTC case involving spam with deceptive subject lines, the agency said.

"When consumers opened the e-mail messages, they were immediately subjected to sexually explicit solicitations," the FTC said. "Because of the deceptive subject lines, consumers had no reason to expect to see such material."

Children may have been exposed to the pornographic e-mail, the agency said.

from NY Times of 28 Apr 2003
E-Mail Service Providers Unite in Bid to Stop Spam
The three leading providers of e-mail accounts said yesterday that they had started to work together to develop ways to reduce the unwanted commercial messages, commonly known as spam, that are increasingly clogging their customers' mailboxes.
The companies America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo are calling for technical changes in the way e-mail is passed around cyberspace to make it easier to determine who really sent it and what it is about.
Each company has developed its own technologies to identify and discard spam, and they boast of these in their advertising. But even though these systems sidetrack several billion pieces a day, they miss so much more that spam has become a leading source of complaints from users. Many studies show that the quantities of spam have at least doubled in the last year so the companies have agreed to cooperate with rivals.

Originaly posted by TW:
The companies America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo are calling for technical changes in the way e-mail is passed around cyberspace to make it easier to determine who really sent it and what it is about.