Lycos And One Way Not To Deal With Spam

Lycos Europe, according to The Register, is distributing “a special screensaver in a controversial bid to battle spam”. Make Love Not Spam “sends a request to view a spam source site. When a large number of screensavers send their requests at the same time the spam web page becomes overloaded and slow”. The idea, of … Read more

Email Newsletters And Reputation Maintenance

It always surprises me how companies which try to present an image of good email practices (i.e., don’t spam) let their standards slip so easily, and their reputations with it. In June 2003 I signed up for Click2Asia, an online dating service for ethnic Asians (no I’m not Asian, but I figured living there for … Read more

Porn Sites Aren’t Just About Sleaze Anymore

In case you needed a reason not to surf for porn, here’s one: Nearly all porn sites install some sort of spyware or adware on visitors’ computers, according to a survey released today by Eblocs.com, an anti-spyware vendor. The study “entailed visiting 100 porn sites and running multiple anti-spyware software programs… to identify any Spyware contaminating … Read more

A New Kind Of Anti-Spam?

Here’s a new anti-spam service which takes a somewhat different approach. RI-based Mail Cruncher works, not by looking at content, but by rating emails according to the reliability of their sender. “In business, I decide to trust other companies based on how long they have been around, their location, who else does business with them, … Read more

Spam Historians

Interesting piece by TechWeb News on Microsoft employee Raymond Chen, who has “saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he’s received at work since 1997”. More intriguingly, he has “graphed the spams and viruses to create a cool visual representation of one man’s malicious traffic”. The resulting chart is fascinating. You can see the whole … Read more