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The CAN-SPAM legislation is a piece of shit…

That’s a technical term, and CAN-SPAM appears to mean what it says on the tin,’can spam’.

It seems that more and more US businesses are realising they can spam everyone as long as they put an opt out on the email. What were the legislators in the US thinking when they dreamt up that gem.

At least the Australian Anti-Spam Act 2003 mandates an opt IN regime not an opt out.

Spam is definitely getting worse, but as I’ve said before it’s now ‘proper spam‘ from real businesses not just random viagra junk.

- end of rant.

Tags: spam

‘Proper’ spam on the increase

The USA’s bodged anti-spam legislation (CAN-SPAM) means that US companies can send unsolicited commercial email as long as there’s an opt out. I suppose this is a result of the ‘free speech’ laws and advertising lobby groups.

Unfortunately one of the side effects of CAN-SPAM is that many organisations outside of the USA think it appleis to them, including Australian companies. This is a dangerous assumption to make as we have an opt-IN regime here and sending bulk unsolicited email without an opt-out can attract a hefty fine if ACMA decides to make an example of you.

The end result of this process is that whilst we’ve seen large strides forward in blocking the usual viagra type of spam there’s been a marked increase in spam from companies that are easily identifiable and have some real products, so I’ve started calling this ‘Proper Spam’.

So now we have to stop ‘real’ email spam, that is spam that’s not ’spammy’, rather than the more easily spotted old school spam without ending up with large numbers of  false positives.

So you heard it here first: Proper Spam = Unsolicited commercial email sent by companies as a direct result of the USA’s CAN-SPAM regulations.

Thanks Uncle Sam.

Tags: filtering, spam

Mobile spam

200 million cellphone users hit by SMS spam tidal wave in China 

Recently reported by Sophos, go here for their story.

Tags: spam

PDFAssassin

No doubt kicked off when PDF spam started arriving in out inboxes PDFAssassin attempts to scan PDF files for ’spammyness’ and adds the Spam Assissin score;

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfassassin/

Tags: spam

x-authentication-warning

Had an issue today with spam filters blocking legit emails and it turns out that it was because the sender was spoofing the ‘from’ address. I suspect this is common when web based apps get http servers like Apache to send out form data via email. Some quick reads here; http://www.tracyphillips.com/2007/05/21/sendmail-x-authentication-warning/

Tags: spam

DSPAM

I’ve been doing my bi-annual review of the anti-spam and anti-virus market place and completely missed DSPAM until Mike from Tall Emu (the Online-Armor people) sent me the link. After a couple of hours research and spotting that local firm Sensory Networks (with some funding from Mark and another Mike at TVP) are involved with the technology I think I’ll setup a test bed on one of our domains and take a look.

Tags: spam