Hotmail Implements Spam Filter System

emerson writes "News.com is reporting that Hotmail has finally taken the plunge and decided to implement the MAPS RBL spam "blackhole" list. The article notes that they have seen a marked decrease in spam in just a short time. Read the whole article." More and more ISPs seem to be jumping on the MAPS RBL bandwagon. It's a very good thing IMO, especially for the "free" e-mail services that attract spammers the same way picnics attract ants.

HotMail *IS* a spam filter

Well for 'the best of us' who are lucky enough to have a real account, HotMail seems to always have been a spam trapper - a way to indentify yourself on newsgroups, registering on a free account (NYT comes to mind) or registering on nearly anything else: you would surely get something of the sort:

• In order to do that / download that / go there please fill in this simple 35 step form, required fields are marked with * (e-mail is marked with an * of course)
  
• "Thank you for you registration, here is your password" + spam spam spam (buy that buy this). The last line says "This is not spam because we include unsubscribe information" (Their concious is not clear already I see ;-)
  
• "Half an hour ago you displayed an enormous interest in our product so here are some news for you" + spam spam spam
  
• You be polite you unsubscribe
  
• "We are awfully sorry that you would have to leave us" + spam spam spam (this is already interesting - they spam you while you try to unsubscribe!). In order to unsubscribe, go to URL:blah.blah.com
  
• Being the patient soul you are, you go to the URL
  
• Unsubscribing, you get the (hopefully final) e-mail stating "You've been unsubscribed, we don't know how we can go on living without you" + spam spam spam.
  

So, just trying to make it as painless as possible yields you at least 5 spam emails, all trying to unsubscribe. They sure don't waste their tim with that.

All spam starts with the line: "THIS IS NOT SPAM"

The irony is killing my inbox

Spammers using Hotmail will be happy to have a mailbox that won't fill up with their competitor's spam right before it gets canceled.

Maybe from now on all spam will be from Hotmail.com to Hotmail.com.

"Who needs open relays when you can get a free mailbox in 96 seconds?"

Re:spam will always be a problem

4. If you don't need to recieve a reply email (like website passwords or account verification) from a site that expects you to give them your adress, use a fake one. It's easy, and allows you to exercise your creative juices... I always like using root@ :)

An even better one is putting in the site's own abuse@ address. If they have one, they'll get the joy of spamming themselves; if they don't, it'll bounce. Nobody gets hurt but the jerks. :)

fh

Stopping spam

There's a really easy way for an ISP to protect itself against people using it to send spam: introduce a one or two second delay before accepting each message. This is insignificant to the normal user --- my mailer, exmh, takes about five seconds between my pressing `send' and control returning to me --- but would stop spammers dead. Two seconds per message means 30 per minute, less than two thousand per hour. It means that they can no longer blast thousands of messages into the server. If you like, you can also implement something that checks for, say, more than a few hundred messages in an hour and automatically disables email.

The effort needed to implement this is trivial.

(You would need a normal mail server to handle mailing lists, of course. But that's not a problem as mailing lists tend to be handled purely at the server end, without the messages been sent down the dial-up link.)

Microsoft vs. Microsoft

What's really funny is that currently Microsoft itself is VERY close to being RBLed for their massive spewage of Y2K related junk E-mail. They are spamming every last E-mail address they have their hands on, and, as a result of that, are really pushing the edge of the envelope.

So, if microsoft.com gets RBLed, we'll just pop some popcorn, and watch what happens when Microsoft ends up RBLing itself...
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