SpamAnti.net in June 2005

News of the world

The big American legislative surprise

On July 1st of 2005, new child protection email address registry laws will become effective in the states of Michigan and Utah. They tell companies to check their email address lists against a list of off-limits addresses.

It intends to stop SPAM before it even reaches children. But what is ignored by most companies (in the US and elsewhere) is that it applies to promotion of gambling, pornography, prescription drugs, but also to all forms of promotion that my indirectly link to that kind of material (let's say it's the case for most of sollicited email).

Delivering one email containing links to the unpermitted materials, or even links to sites which have information about the unpermitted materials (think about possible ads on the linked-to web site), to one of the protected addresses any email marketer strictly liable under the laws.

Unfortunately, this piece of legislation applicable on July 1st (yes! this week!) is 99% unkonwn. The Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy is an organism trying to inform companies about this issue.

Microsoft fearful tactics against SPAM

After the (too optimistic?) declarations of Bill Gates who wants to make SPAM disappear in 2006, Microsoft is firing from all its cannons against SPAM and spammers. Some related news:

• trials against spammeurs all over the wolrd (e.g., in Germany)
• The proposal of authentication technologies like Sender ID.
• Now, they tell ISPs that Hotmail and MSN will automatically mark as SPAM all emails without adequate Sender ID tags.

Obviously, this last proposal could be welcome quite coldly. There are indeed a number of technological solutions under negociation for authenticaton of email mesages. Thus, it could lead not to a fast adoption of Sender ID but to a more difficult life for Microsoft customers.

Yet another anti-virus entering the realm of anti-SPAM

The latest to move (like many others) from antivirus software into anti-SPAM solutions is Trend Micro. They just bought the tiny Kelkea (AOL was among their customer portfolio, ayway).

Source: µ the INQUIRER

Yahoo! and Cisco group their efforts

These two companies proposed technologies to authentify the sender of electronic mail messages (in order to help fighting against SPAM by the implementation of reputation-based services): Yahoo! DomainKeys and Cisco IIM. Now, they decided to associate in a common push of DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) that is build on top of a very powerful public key cryptography.

Even if its parents are impressive, this technology will have to fight for its place amid the wealth of competing technologies.

According to:

News of SpamAnti.net

Some older news archived at SpamAnti.net