Re: Beware of making bad decisions on stale data

> It stopped happening for you because it sounds like you or your ISP have
> good filters. Large companies like Kraft/Gevalia Coffee have turned to
> spammers for more business, trying to achieve a "plausible
> deniability". And they're getting sued. http://legal.hypertouch.com/

Ok, I always assumed those were from small-time affiliates. I've read about complaints against Gevalia but I didn't know they were actually supporting this behavior.

> Millions of idiots still buy pills, refinance, and fake college degrees.

> http://www.sophos.com/spaminfo/articles/masssuit.html

I've always liked Sophos. But just as I thought, this spam is being sent by a crime ring and not an actual company.

> Newbies are easy to catch and educate. Nigerians are easy to filter. The
> top 200 ROKSO-class spammers are still a huge problem at the ISP level.

I'm looking at the list, and these are mostly individuals. I don't see any names I'm familiar with. As I thought, the big spam comes from small jerks.

> Because AOL takes spammers to court and is quite effective. Also
> Microsoft.

I received an interesting unsolicited email from a group called SPAMIS announcing that Microsoft is a big-time spammer. Now I'm confused. Well that's off-topic.

> All the country-based and rogue-network blacklists you would ever need can
> be found at http://www.blackholes.us/

Why is this info restricted? I'd like to know this stuff.

> Perhaps by the numbers of spammers. Not by the numbers of emails sent. No
> more than 5% of the spam I see in my filters comes from MLM or other sorts
> of newbies. At the ISP level, it's almost all the pharma, XXX, mortgage,
> fake watches, etc. professionals. If you lurk for any time in the spammer
> forums such as specialham.com (when it's up, that is) you can see what
> they get recruited to spam for.

I'd be interested in looking at this site, maybe I'll do that after establishing a fake identity. I guess I believe you when you say that otherwise legit companies hire spammers. Maybe my problem was using the word "newbie". Of course there must be people who spam for a living in a manner beyond the reach of any normal person. I agree "newbie" is the wrong word for these people. Maybe "fool" is more appropriate.

> And so is AWeber, amazingly enough.

I just did a bunch of research about the various autoresponders. AWeber is #1 on a lot of lists for acceptance by ISPs.

> Nice to meet you, too. You sound
> pretty technically savvy, but unless you're in the trenches along the
> front lines in the spam wars, or reading a lot of real-time data about the
> nature of the threat, you're likely to underestimate the magnitude of the
> enemy.

I agree that you know more about spam than I do.