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by Mike Masnick

Tue, Feb 18th 2003 7:08pm





Microsoft Going After Hotmail Spammers

from the one-small-step dept

Microsoft has been accused of being "friendly" to spammers via their Hotmail service, but now, they're trying to change that by suing some of the people they believe have been harvesting Hotmail addresses. Microsoft hasn't yet tracked down the spammers, but instead filed a "John Doe" suit, which they'll use to try to track down spammers. While I'm all for smacking down spammers with as heavy a stick as anyone can find, there is a fine line between forcing companies to give up a spammer and forcing them to give up the name of someone who is downloading music...

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  1.  

    No Subject Given

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    Al, Feb 18th, 2003 @ 8:58pm

    I don't know that I agree with that opinion, you could equally say that anything good could be bad/be abused in the future. This has to be a good thing, the amount of spam you get if you have a hotmail account is disgraceful, and if it becomes a bad thing in the future, well, that's hypothetical.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    I guess we'll have to wait and see.

    identicon
    thecaptain, Feb 19th, 2003 @ 6:43am

    This kind of thing isn't going to dent the spam hotmail accounts get. Microsoft has the expertise to filter a LOT of the spam that gets sent (a good percentage of which are dictionary attacks that I can see). But they won't...this is a publicity move.
    Why?
    Simple. Stopping spam is against Microsoft's best interest. They make money selling "premium" accounts on hotmail...what's a premium account? An address that 1) has more space and 2) does NOT get "inactivated" when it gets full. So, to sell "premium" accounts its easy for them to let the "junk mail" folder fill up (and it does quite fast - mine fills up my 2meg quota in 2-3 days...if I don't login while I'm on vacation, the account is useless) and then they "inactivate" the account (meaning that ALL mail TO the account is bounced until you log in and delete some stuff) and then they suggest that this wouldn't happen if you fork over 29.95 a year...
    No, its not in their best interest to stop spam.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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