More FUD.
Real spammers use opt-in addresses, collected by the companies they are
spamming for. This costs the company no more than collecting snail mail
addresses. Most companies collect these opt-in addresses.
Only radical antispammers collect and abuse addresses via things like
webscanning. And then they tell people that spammers do this. Clue: There
are no real companies selling fake viagra via spam. These, and many other
"spams" are sent to you by anti-spammer script kiddies to try to get
people to pass anti-spam legislation.
Of course, real spammers aren't violating the anti-spam legislation. They
weren't before, and aren't now. When blacklists like MAPS block them,
they sue in court, and win. Real spammers are now on fixed IP addresses
with T3 connections. They are easy to pick out of the "noise". I haven't
seen a single unsolicited spam from them.
In fact, haven't seen a spam that is both _unsolicited_ and _genuine_ in
over a year. Yet I am getting 500+ a day. It was steady at around 300+ a
day all summer, but jumped up to 500+ about a week ago. It has been steady
at 500+ a day. Funny, that. Yet almost none of it is genuine, and what
is genuine, is opt-in.
So there is no reason whatsoever for Verisign to collect "verified"
addresses to spam people. This is completely ludicrous FUD that
anti-spammers have been promoting for a long time. While there once were
unsolicited spammers. They've all changed their operations, now. But back
then, they already had your address. They didn't need to "verify it".
Advertisers are interested in response rate, not "verified addresses".
Radical antispammer script kiddies just didn't know this, because they are
kiddies with no business or marketing education.
FUD doesn't stand the test of time.
But Goodwins law has been called, so this will have to wait a little
longer.
--Dean
On Wed, 24 Sep 2003 Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu wrote:
On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 19:35:45 EDT, Dean Anderson <dean(_at_)av8(_dot_)com>
said:
There has been no evidence that Verisign has collected any sender
addresses, nor would there be any reason for them to want to.
*plonk* Sorry Dean, you've finally managed to push over the edge from
"possibly
just dense" into "obviously being intentionally dense".
"nor would there be any reason"? Take the number of mis-addressed pieces of
mail per day (which was sufficient to even DDoS their Snubby server, which was
hopefully not a very heavy-weight MTA), and multiply by the going rate for
pre-washed e-mail addresses.
Or phrased differently - given that it's all about the benjamins, is there any
reason to expect them to *NOT* use the data they're being given to compile
lists for spammers?