Spammers Booted (For Now)

US firm Savvis was allegedly earning up to $2 million a month from 148 of the world's worst spammers, a former employee had claimed. Following talks with anti-spam groups, Savvis has now promised to get rid of the spammers using its network.

I'd never heard of Savvis, but the subsidiary they bought and "inherited" the spammers from didn't have a good reputation from what I recall (I used to read some of the anti-spam newsgroups back in the day). However, it's likely someone will form a new corporation to pick up all that lovely business, because Savvis really, really liked the income. So I won't be looking for a reduction in the penile power/viagra/Nigerian scam mail for a while yet.

Not exactly spam, but…

There seems to be something of a flap on in the spam/spyware/hackware category: Chicago Tribune | Experts Study Developing Internet Attack We ran Ad-Aware just now because everything was running slowly, with a lot of unknown activity. AOL Communicator and AOL were going nuts. Hmm. I ran Norton after David left because I ran across this somewhat more authoritative article in the Trib than some of the blog entries I noticed about the problem. May be something in it.

So THAT’s why I got so much spam on AOL

A software engineer for America Online stole the Internet provider's customer list � some 92 million names � and sold it to an on-line marketer, setting off a torrent of unsolicited commercial e-mail commonly known as spam, federal authorities said today.

You know, I'd say this wasn't the first time this happened. I used to have a volunteer job on AOL answering mail questions, and they were just so drag-assy about spam blocking, like it just wasn't that big a deal. And meanwhile, I was getting more spam than anything on my AOL account, I still have an AOL account, which readers can figure out if they sits and haves a good think. And I read it behind AOL Classic's own somewhat not-sucky spam filters, and then behind AOL Communicator's somewhat more robust and trainable filters, and THEN behind a Bayesian filter thing-doodad David has running. And I STILL get spam on the AOL account… most days, it's all that's in my inbox. Although I will say that traffic on the Highlander mailing list HIGHLA-L has picked up again. Dear old Amanda, people love to talk (and argue) about her. It's nice to see something other than mystery meat in the old inbox of a morning.