Legal Research

This Explains Why I Only Saw 406 Junk Messages In My Email This Morning

Yesterday the NY Times reported that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission shut down a major spammer network.  From the article:

• At one point, the network accounted for 1/3 of all spam

• Their botnet consisted of 35,000 compromised PCs — Notice I wrote “PCs” and not “computers”.  Typical arrogant Mac evangelist. — and had the capability to send 10 billion emails a day

• They cleared more than $400K in VISA charges in one month alone

The TImes quotes FTC commissioner Jon Leibowitz: “We are hoping at some level that this will help make a small dent in the amount of spam coming into consumers’ inboxes.”

Um … Sorry.

You want less spam?  Set up a Gmail account strictly for personal use.  Gmail has a great spam filter.  Use another email account for things like online registrations, blog comments, and such.  That’s your sacrificial lamb; you don’t care how much junk gets sent to it.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on October 15, 2008 (boomark / email).