Interesting article about how ICSTIS is going after the sms spammers and the number of complaints they have received. They include details about the spammer who spammed me and then got fined £50k

I received a 411 scam mail today that claimed they were Mohammed Abacha and had been imprisoned, with a link to the BBC website about the imprisonment. If I replied to a canada.com address then I could claim my share in $29million dollars. Funny how they sent the email via a french (free) email portal though!

Report from the BBC reckons that the UK has banned Spam messages. The main flaw that I can see is that it doesn’t take effect until December, will only be of use on emails sent from the uk (ie 0.0000000001% of spam) and will not count for business address’s. Whats the point of excluding business address’s when there is so much screaming about the millions of pounds being wasted by staff having to deal with spam emails? Does that mean sending to sales@ or info@ is a loophole spammers could exploit as they could claim they are sending it to a business address? With the catchall facility most emails have, then emails to these address’s are going to get through. This is similar to the ICSTIS stance on spam sms messages to the mobile where they won’t take action on complaints i’ve made because its a business mobile (as if the sms messages were business related OR the spammer realised it was a business mobile? Likely story).. I really wish the people who lived in the Ivory towers of lawmaker land would open their doors and get some real life experience!

Heard back from ICSTIS today about my complaint .

I need to find a way of spamencoding emails on the website (or removing the email address’s from MT as I think I got my email address crawled from it. At the moment the only spams that seem to be getting through to my mailbox are the Nigerian 411 ones.

Following on from the post about Microsoft suing 15 spammers, they have finally admitted that one of the alleged spammers is actually innocent. I hope that they did more than apologise after dragging his name through the mud like that. Mind you, it serves as a warning for anyone buying a domain to make sure that it’s not been used for spam in the past.

Decided to download the spam from my mailserver on localhost to my mail client so I can clean the mail server up and also take a look at some of the spam. They are getting quite clever now in how they avoid spamfilters. One I saw the other day used the fact that invalid html tags are ignored. So the spam contained a line such as “get y<hello>our ne<world>ws her<test>e” which would get past a spam filter looking for the words “get your news here”.