Microsoft Going After Hotmail Spammers
from the one-small-step dept
Microsoft has been accused of being "friendly" to spammers via their Hotmail service, but now, they're trying to change that by suing some of the people they believe have been harvesting Hotmail addresses. Microsoft hasn't yet tracked down the spammers, but instead filed a "John Doe" suit, which they'll use to try to track down spammers. While I'm all for smacking down spammers with as heavy a stick as anyone can find, there is a fine line between forcing companies to give up a spammer and forcing them to give up the name of someone who is downloading music...
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I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Why?
Simple. Stopping spam is against Microsoft's best interest. They make money selling "premium" accounts on hotmail...what's a premium account? An address that 1) has more space and 2) does NOT get "inactivated" when it gets full. So, to sell "premium" accounts its easy for them to let the "junk mail" folder fill up (and it does quite fast - mine fills up my 2meg quota in 2-3 days...if I don't login while I'm on vacation, the account is useless) and then they "inactivate" the account (meaning that ALL mail TO the account is bounced until you log in and delete some stuff) and then they suggest that this wouldn't happen if you fork over 29.95 a year...
No, its not in their best interest to stop spam.
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