You've Got Spam: AOL Blocks 1/2 Trillion Spam 472
yohaas writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that AOL blocked more than 500 billion spam messages for its users in 2003. That comes to 40 messages a day per user. The company regularly blocks 75-80% of all incoming mail as spam! The article also lists the top 10 spam phrases for the year, including such come-ons as: 'Viagra online', 'Online pharmacy', 'Get out of debt' and 'Get bigger'."
Their mail server went down again, that's all (Score:5, Funny)
(is this another dupe story?)
Re:They're loosing more than that (Score:4, Informative)
Even the ones running on fixed IPs, which tend to be a more savvy class of user, and much easier to trace, too.
Now that you mention this, I think a reject from AOL was exactly the reason I finally got around to fixing my Sendmail config to route my outgoing mail through my ISP's server. ( define(`SMART_HOST',`mail.sbcglobal.net') ) So in that sense, I guess their plan is working.
Imagine. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, the idea is repeatedly turned down for its utter lack of pragmatism.
But damn, 500 billion spams, and that's only to AOL.
Just imagine.
The instant clogging of mail-servers around the world and subsequent technological disruption might actually get the general computer-using public to take more of an interest in the fact that around 200 gangs of people are effectively raping and pillaging the Internet right under their eyes.
But then again, what can one do when faced with the Tragedy of the Commons?
Re:Imagine. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Imagine. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Imagine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Imagine. (Score:5, Informative)
And to give AOL a little credit, even they are making fun of all the CD's they mail out in their most recent TV ads.
Though it makes my head hurt to see Jerry Stiller and Snoop Dogg in a commercial together. That's just wrong on so many diffferent levels...
Re:Imagine. (Score:5, Funny)
Now wait just one minnizle.
Re:Imagine. (Score:5, Insightful)
And if that is not enough, I can assure you, a great deal of spam is comming in from windows systems that have been infected with some exploit and turned into mail relays. Real Time Blacklists have been a lot less effective over the past few weeks due to spam comming from dsl and cable lines now with a new vigor. Its not just a couple comming from an owned pc, its a couple hundred.
And yet, its still fucking legal! Explain it to me God, explain it to me, I want it explained, Jesus!!!!!!
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Imagine. (Score:3, Insightful)
no it not legal, it's illegal on so many different levels, that its hard for the Law Enforcement to keep track of it all. Most cops have a hard enough time keeping up with their case load, to bother looking at the big picture once in a while.
I can assure you, a great deal of spam is comming in from windows systems that have been infected with some exploit and turned into mail relays. isn't that comp
Re:Imagine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nor is it any better of a move if done with the approval of management. Each ISP who does it will alienate its own customers -- "You let spam into my mailbox to prove to me that spam is bad? I already knew that, shithead!" -- and will lose customers to those ISPs who do not breach their customers' trust in this fashion.
In short, letting spam in doesn't demonstrate that spam is bad. We already know that spam is bad. All it demonstrates is that you are willing to hurt people who trust you in order to make a point. That's called being an asshole. And that is why this "protest" has been shot down time and again.
Re:Imagine. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've done a lot of email work with companies.
It's damaging email. It's hurting business. It costs BILLIONS a year to slow down spam to make mailboxes not entirely useless.
A manager: "I can't see how someone serious about doing business could keep relying on email."
Mail is being discarded (no bounce backs, no trail) all over the place.
Now, when the US House stops blocking spam to their own mailboxes, maybe we'll get some laws with some balls and maybe the FTC, FBI and similar agencies might get the budget and motivation to track down the HUGE amount of spam that is illegal in that it's perpetrating scams or illegal medicines.
We convict the minor players and offer them real prison or they get to appear on the new Fox show:
"Cane the Spammer".
20 whacks. Each whack given by a system admin selected by lottery.
Do it public and demotivate the kiddies willing to blast out some mail for some guy for $500.
Re:Short of going to war with China (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you think that a bunch of poor people in China are all of a sudden picking up laptops and peddling viagra? It's not the Chinese, it's the same people [slashdot.org] who have always sent spam. They are just buying their hosting/bandwidth from companies overseas, where regulations are non-existant.
Yeah but... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's n
Re:Short of going to war with China (Score:5, Informative)
I used to work for a large, well-known hosting company whose name is taken from a book of the Bible. They didn't have to many spammers or pr0n sites in their space when things were booming, but now they're among the worst for hosting spammers.
There are network providers all over the country that are as bad or worse. I recently ran across one that had a
A lot of spam is sent through China by contract with network providers there, and through South Korea because it's the open proxy capitol of the world, and there is a very large and well organized spam ring operating in eastern Europe as well, and it seems soundly connected to US spammers. The spam business has gone international in a big way.
In none of those places, including the US and Canada, generally, is spam illegal, so it's never necessary to bribe any government official into looking the other way. It's just easier to pay off the ISP to look the other way in some countries, but again, that's pretty easy in a lot of places in North America too. When the economy goes down, pink contracts go up. Many companies and individuals will do just about anything to survive, and network providers are certainly no exception. For every one that will cut a spammer's connection as soon as they notice, there's another that will happily sell the spammer as much bandwidth and IP space as he wants. Then they pass that space on to some other unsuspecting customer, who finds that she can't send mail to a lot of places because that netblock is in every RBL - good, bad, or ugly - in the world.
As much as we rightly despise spammers, those who sheeld them and knowingly sell them bandwidth and colo space are just as bad.
Re:Short of going to war with China (Score:3, Insightful)
The vast majority of spam is very much illegal, always has been! It's not like breaking the law is any more or less illegal just because it's done by spam instead of some other medium.
The real problem here is enforcement.
Re:Short of going to war with China (Score:3, Insightful)
Poor is a relative thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Fran
Outbound (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Blocking outbound e-mail (Score:3, Interesting)
What might work, but would require resources would be to setup some sort of profile system which only allows selective port 25 filtering. (This will be an expensive idea, with some invasion of privacy.)
For every customer, start a list of the SMTP servers that they contact, and only allow them to contact up to 10 different SMTP servers. If a customer hits their limit due to trojan'd mach
You've got spam??!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:2)
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think that? AOL tends to have a lot of false positives when blocking spam.
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:5, Interesting)
Our mail server has somehow erroneously been blacklisted and so we have added about 100 emails of that "Spam" to that half a trillion. I'm sure we're not alone.
The blacklists aren't infallible and get messed up and tend to be very slow to respond to errors or worse just don't bother (or even worse demand money to be removed in one noteable case).
What the article should say is that AOL blocked half a trillion emails, god knows how many of them were legit emails or how many really were spam...
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:3, Informative)
So go email the antispam guy on AOL (not from YOUR email address naturally), his name's Carl, and he's a nice and reasonable guy who will tell you precisely why your server was blocked. AOL can make mistakes, but they don't sustain blocks without evidence.
You'll have to subscribe to SPAM-L (http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l) to find his full name and email address since I won't share it here, but that shouldn't take too long.
False positives... (Score:3, Insightful)
The free service I have in Russia blocks yahoo all of the time now, doesn't even tell the user who sent it that their mail couldn't be delivered. It just disappears into a blackhole. I'm sure they block others as well. It's pretty rare for me to get spam on that account. Since I know they block people I'm reluctant to use the address as much anymor
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but the ratio of false positives to false negatives is tunable.
You know enough about spam blocks to know that there are shitloads of keywords they're looking for
It has little to do with keywords. The things that catch most people is broad block lists.
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:4, Informative)
If I had to guess, something similar is happening over there. I'd recommend looking into it. It is very resolvable.
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:3, Informative)
SMTP AUTH has existed for ages; it allows one to authenticate themselves to the SMTP server.
In fact, my e-mail provider, gmx.net, uses it. (It's a free provider.) So does my ISP, Speedline.ca.
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:3, Interesting)
False Positives (Score:4, Informative)
AOL blocks any mail that is routed direct to the Mail Exchanger (Or simply has the headers stripped to anonymize it's origin)
This excludes a whole lot of out of the box UNIX/Linux/BSD installs, as well as anonymizers and some website registration verification scripts. I'd rather not have to send your website login password through 3 different servers before it reaches your ISP. (Of course, the password shouldn't be sent through the email anyways, but a lot of sites do).
That's not what I'd call "being conservative". To me, being conservative would be tagging suspected spam as such, and letting the MUA filter it into a seperate mailbox. AOL can include a MUA (Netscape) on it's disk, so it can be pre-configured.
Re:You've got spam??!? (Score:3, Funny)
You think anyone would buy from spam like that?!
:P
It would be WAY too easy . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It would be WAY too easy . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It would be WAY too easy . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Um, how did you get the idea AOL was getting to advertise "for FREE"? The United States Postal Service is being paid by AOL [arkansasusa.com] for every person who signs up with a disc distributed by the post office. In theory, it means that postal rates won't go up as often or as much.
Re:It would be WAY too easy . . . (Score:3, Informative)
They should do something. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They should do something. (Score:3, Insightful)
Erm, I think you'll find that the average spammer will send more than one email from a compromised machine. So there's probably slightly less than half a trillion machines involved here...
Re:They should do something. (Score:3, Informative)
As much as I'd love for AOL to start kicking down spammers' doors, they can't exactly do that legally themselves.
Anybody attorneys want to commen
What good is it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, the number doesn't surprise me either (Score:5, Interesting)
They also block real mail (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe there is something she's not telling me.
Mom!
Re:They also block real mail (Score:5, Funny)
"Mom! The all new penis patch will get you bigger and harder than ever!" your email would go through.
Re:They also block real mail (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, from what I read on the net my hosting provider's experience with AOL's blocking of incoming SMTP connections is not out of the ordinary, many, maybe hundreds, of "little guys" have had the same experience. Makes me want to know the false positive rate for their spam blocking -- I'm willing to bet that AOL themselves don't even know the answer to that one.
Re:They also block real mail (Score:3, Informative)
AOL's mail policies suck (Score:5, Informative)
Procmamil, my friend. (Score:3, Informative)
From my ~/.procmailrc :
* ^From:
Re:AOL's mail policies suck (Score:5, Informative)
In main.cf:
Under smtpd_sender_restrictions add a line that looks like this:
check_client_access regexp:/etc/postfix/client_access
Make a file client_access:
And your head stops hurting. Been there, done that. - Love postfix.
Take a look at the snapshot rev, and the reject_unverified_sender option too. Great stuff.
PS:A OL gives you what you need to help the bounce problem on this handy page http://postmaster.info.aol.com/info/servers.html [aol.com]
-- +1 for low user id, -1 for posting good comment.
stop spam now - top 10 phrases (Score:5, Funny)
seriously, I get 5-10 spam email / day telling me how to stop receiving spam emails.
I don't know why I believed them (Score:2, Funny)
including a gajillion non-spam (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:including a gajillion non-spam (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:including a gajillion non-spam (Score:3, Informative)
Huh? No way! I have a business level cable modem plan, and my
I am so sick of spam (Score:5, Funny)
Collateral Damage (Score:5, Insightful)
I run my own mail server, not blocked (Score:3, Interesting)
To get around the port 25 block I run my mail server on an alternate port for myself and then use RinetD on port 25 which fowards to the mail server. My e-mail going out is none of my ISP's business. The server that actually sends the mail is hosted by anoth
My Mother-In-Law *Loves* AOL (Score:3, Insightful)
She gets her celebrity n
Efficiency Rate? (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, I get spam from AOL and they dont seem to be doing anything about it, maybe they should be concetrating on blocking their outgoing spam too.
My own score (Score:4, Interesting)
Spam has dropped since January 1st for me (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Spam has dropped since January 1st for me (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
All those 1000 hour free CDs being put to use in the wrong hands...
That's 9k petebytes (Score:5, Insightful)
=9,765.6 petabytes [I guessed at the average size of a spam email]
I wonder how much that costs AOL?
Re:That's 9k petebytes (Score:3, Insightful)
Some stats (Score:2, Informative)
Only Spam? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unwarranted assumptions (Score:3, Insightful)
RoadRunner sucks too, (Score:2)
I'm pissed at RR over it and emailed them but they say "too bad, your friends need to contact their ISP and have their ISP stop violating OUR policies. Either that or they can switch ISP'
Not counting... (Score:2)
How do you people get so much spam? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How do you people get so much spam? (Score:2, Informative)
Is there something others are doing with their email, or is the fact that the people who do get hundreds of SPAM or whatever amount it takes to be unproductive, just popular or is there something else they are doing?
One little bit of design... (Score:2)
Hotmail (Score:2)
The only way to end spam (Score:2)
Stopping spam. (Score:5, Interesting)
Note: I did some thinking earlier on spam, and I figured I would post this the next time slashdot does a story on spam... You can find a link to this at:
http://sillygoth.com/journal/21669 [sillygoth.com]
This is my writing... I just want some feedback on it from the slashdot crowd.
Okay...
One of the things that I've been tired of recently is dealing with lots and lots of spam in my inbox. I've become even more tired of hearing about how there's a lack of solutions for dealing with it. It's one of the things that slashdot has been endlessly parading about.
To me, the primarily problem with spam is that emails are too easily spoofable. Solve this, and spam will become *much* more managable.
So, what technology is there right now that deals with certifying legitimacy?
Digital Certificates!
When you go to a site that's protected with https, the owners of the site usually have to get a certificate from a trusted source (Verisign, Thawte, etc) signifying that the site is legitimate (so that you don't end up giving credit card information to someone fronting for that company).
You actually *can* get a digital certificate for your email, but it costs money. Plus, to make something like that mandatory, each user would have to set up a certificate individually. Evil.
Why not move authentication to the domain itself? When accounts are setup on a user's machine, create an RSA public / private key per account. Simple enough.
When a user sends an email, force this user to relay the email through the mail server rather than directly from his/her computer. Force the user to authenticate their email / password to send the message. Some servers already force this, I believe.
When the user authenticates him/herself, encode a confirmation id using some elements of the email (first xx characters of message, subject, date, etc) using the RSA private key and attach it to the message.
Here's what should change with the receiving server... When a mail server receives the message, the mail server should initiate a separate connection that looks up the domain's MX server, and communicates with it.
This MX server should then provide the RSA public key for the account listed. The public key will then be used to decrypt the stamp that the MX server included with the message. If the stamp is legitimate, deliver the message to the inbox.
If a stamp is not legitimate, or there's no stamp, simply don't deliver the message. Simple enough.
This method has its series of strengths:
There would be absolutely no point in spammers taking over people's machines with viruses in order to send email if email must be sent through a qualified mail server. It's possible that worms could be written to auto-send messages through these relays, but at least then the mail server could detect it and shut the person out.
If mail sent is authenticated from a domain, people would then have the option to blacklist domains that aren't responsible for keeping tabs on its users.
Mail *will* come from where it says it's coming from. If not from the exact user on the domain, it'll come from that particular machine.
Of course, there are possible weaknesses to this strategy too.
If the mail server is hacked, hackers would be able to still send mail from it using the private key. Fortunately, they would only be able to send from email addresses listed under domains they own.
Spam software like SpamCop / Spamassassin / etc would be able to keep tabs on servers that exhibit hacked behavior, and temporarily blacklist these servers until resolved.
This doesn't necessarily stop users with legitimate email addresses from sending spam. Someone with a legitimate email address can still be spammed.
But at least when you block their email address or domain, it'll be a real email address, and a real domain name.
This method is not 100% in eliminating spam. But it's a damn good start.
oh no, spam! screw privacy! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, you can get those in your BIOS and media files and anywhere else. "Trusted Computing" EVIL. "Trusted E-Mail" GOOD.
What is wrong with you people?
You know what I do to block spam?
I filter out links contained in e-mails and block the COMPANIES.
I don't care how forged the header is. If the e-mail contains a link to spam domain it doesn't get through.
Nobody's right to privacy is infringed and it's 100% effective and 1
they should release the spam (Score:2)
That'd make for one hell of a bayesian filter.
And this is the reason... (Score:5, Funny)
Just run through a spell check (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason AOL blocks so much legit mail (Score:4, Insightful)
AOL is a host to spammers--boycott AOL (Score:3, Flamebait)
Complain to AOL about it? They do nothing--since it's not a @aol.com address, they deny responsibility, yet collect cash from their spam customers. Very convenient. I find it funny that AOL supported the CAN SPAM act, which legalizes spam and invalidates tougher local laws, such as California's. Boycott AOL if you dislike spam.
Make credit card acceptors register (Score:4, Insightful)
Time to grow up (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever happened now? SMTP started out pretty open. Obviously things got out of control. So, fix it already. A group of ISPs can gang up and require all SMTP users to sign up with their username/password, which is already supported by all e-mail clients. Limit each user to 1000 e-mails a day (allowing for rather large mailing lists, but still 1000 times too low to make spam attractive for the subscription price). Then only accept e-mail from cooperating hosts over SSL pipes with a correct certificate. Prepend BORK: to the subject lines from other domains so that users can filter them to another mailbox.
If yahoo participates, I can always ask people to sign up for a free account if they really want to reach me. Smaller ISPs will jump on the chance to de-bork their e-mails and make customers happier. Once enough of them do, bigger ISPs will have an incentive as well. Problem solved!
I hate aol's blocking! (Score:4, Informative)
We have a website, and about 1 million customers (not sure how many active..) have accounts on our website to download updates, patches, etc.
When they forget a password, they choose can option to have their password sent to them.
They can also request technical support via e-mail.
The forms sent out for both of those are very similar and AOL appears to 'randomly' block many of these e-mails. Sometimes they'll go through, sometimes they won't. We can trace the e-mail to aol's server, watch it be accepted but never have the customer on the phone recieve it.
They're 'spam prevention' isn't as great as it could be, especially since we've contacted them and they've promised to 'look in to it'.
Re:I hate aol's blocking! (Score:5, Interesting)
Call, stay on hold 45 minutes, and you get "white listed" for 30 days and they ask you to setup a special email to send you spam complaints to if that IP becomes a problem again in the future. Sounds good right? I mean we host nearly 13,000 web sites for over 6000 customers, we DO get some spam sent through us once in a while (open formmail.php is the worst) and we handle it the second it's noticed.
HOWEVER we have YET to recieve ONE, and I mean that as in a SINGLE complaint from AOL for ANY of our ips. Yet 7 times now we've been blocked. Luckily it hasn't happened in a few weeks.
Do you know how annoying it is when 13,000 web sites become unable to talk to aol? Jesus christ.
Here's the funny part, often times it's only 1 or 2 of the (best I can tell) 4 main MX servers blocking us, so much for keeping those in sync.
I applaud them for trying to curb the incoming spam but goddamnit make it POSSIBLE to work with and if you block someone TELL THEM WHY and maybe a little warning please! If I'm notified of a problem I'll GLADLY nuke the spammers ass, or if it's just an open script, we can help the customer secure it, but if we're not informed what can we do? At least spamcop sends us emails with headers of the spam so we can take care of it.
So I gotta wonder how many of that half trillion is REALLY spam and how much is erroneous blocking.
New Email Protocol (Score:4, Insightful)
AOL makes headway om Spam (Score:4, Informative)
One time, when my usual ISP was down, I needed internet. Desparate, (back when I ran Winders) I threw on an AOL CD to use some of the 1045 hours of free access, planning to cancel when my regular ISP was back online. Cancelling AOL is interesting, first off, the person who answers the calls has been brainwashed to think AOL is the greatest THING ever, and will first ask you why you want to cancel, then argue with your reasoning. Once you go through all that, they will offer you two free months of service while you reconsider. DON'T FALL FOR THIS. I did, and forgot, and the bastards charged my credit card three months later. I was mad as hell and had to go through the Movementarian "You're free to leave anytime you want, but tell us why you're leaving" grilling on the phone all over again. Of course, they offered me two free months again, so apparently you can stay on AOL for free indefinitely this way (But why would you want to?).
Kaolin may be the only English word with "aol" as a substring.
More laws, higher penalties (Score:3, Insightful)
So what do we need? Harsher laws, of course. And stop saying they won't work already. The main spammers are known [spamhaus.org] all we need to do is put, say, the top-50 away for life.
Sounds harsh? I don't think so. Spammers are committing a very serious, evil crime: Stealing from the commons.
Unfortunately, in our corporate dominated world, where things don't count unless they are property of someone and can be put on a quarterly report, that idea is mostly lost.
That doesn't change the facts. Spammers are stealing from all of us. A single spam mail might be petty theft, but it's petty theft times several million.
The law needs to recognize that spam is destroying a part of society, and adapt the sentences. Fuck fines. Put the notorious spammers away for a few decades, into a prison for serial-rapists and murderers. Make their cases extremely public. Make it clear that now that the top-50 list has been cleaned out, anyone aspiring to take one of those spots has a cell reserved already.
Weird definition of SPAM (Score:3, Interesting)
If they really want to get a handle on spam, fwd:fwd:fwd Urban folklore... they should really block *@aol.com.
Spam Spam Spam (Score:3, Insightful)
But is it all "spam"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, it's a nice attention grabbing figure to help raise public awareness of the issue, and I have zero issues with that.
Re:How to stop SPAM at the source (Score:5, Interesting)
Whitelisting makes sense--trusting certain mailservers more and not bothering with intense heuristics on mail coming from them. But blacklisting anyone you don't know makes none. The Internet is too vast to really implement something like this without huge costs and huge losses; I think solutions like this likely do far more to Balkanize the Internet than to protect it.
The solution mentioned in a previous Slashdot article a few days ago of making SMTP servers run a small computation per e-mail makes much more sense. This allows you to impose restrictions on non-whitelisted servers without completly ignoring them, either.
But when you talk about the anonymity preferred by the spammers, you ignore the fact that they are, in fact, selling a product. Forget the spammers. Track down their clients, the ones paying for the ads. Problem solved.
Re:How to stop SPAM at the source (Score:3, Informative)
You'd pay your upstream connections to approve you. The cost would cover verifying your ID at a court or escrow office, and doing a credit check, so people would know how to collect after winning a lawsuit if you violate the TOS for sending signed email. Since your assets would be on the line, you would take similar care verifying your downstream connections. Mailing lists would all move to web sites, where the only wa
Imagine (Score:5, Interesting)
Or anonymous e-mail. That's where this "signed" e-mail crap is going.
Imagine every message you send being tracible right back to you.
But hey, what's the trashing of rights in the name of convienience.
If you can send e-mails without being traced, so can spammers.
If spammers can't send e-mails without being traced, neither can you.
"Spammers are most afraid of being tracked and identified. "
Yeah, and nobody has a legitimate reason to not want to be traced.
I spent all of 2 hours modifying RinetD to do proper logging in between senders and my mail server. I spent another 3 hours writting a simple program to parse that log pulling out who a message is from, who it's going to, the subject line and what links it contains and the domains of those links.
Any entry "to" entry that isn't one of my e-mail addresses is deleted. The remaining are then examined for spam domains by looking at the froms and subject lines and the domains themselves.
A short list:
If expression both matches "*imgehost.com*" Delete ""
If expression both matches "*mydailyoffer.com*" Delete ""
If expression both matches "*topofferz.net*" Delete ""
If expression both matches "*adweawen.biz*" Delete ""
If expression both matches "*divineprice.com*" Delete ""
If expression both matches "*stamps.com*" Delete ""
And poof, no more ads from those companies and nobody's right to privacy is infringed. If they happen to have multiple domains for the same campaign I'll catch them as they come.
I will not support a means to subvert my right to privacy over some stupid ads.
How much are your rights worth to you? Not much apparently.
Terrorists blow up buildings and we get the patriot act. "terrorists" flood inboxes and you demand tracable e-mail.
Get bent.
Ben
Re:"Report as Spam" (Score:3, Informative)
Because that's not "opt-in". Opt-in email should be separate and distinct from any business relationship you have with a customer.