Governments need to pass more anti-spam laws, give law enforcement agencies more resources and work better across borders to combat unsolicited e-mail clogging up inboxes, an international economic group said Wednesday.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international forum of 30 countries established to promote economic growth and trade, also called on private industry to cooperate with government spam-fighting efforts and to help governments establish nationwide spam education campaigns. In addition, countries need to pass laws that provide "clear directions" on rules regarding bulk e-mail, the group said. more»
Microsoft Wednesday plans to promote adoption of the Sender ID email specification and introduce a new program for helping ISPs protect the integrity of email messages at the Email Authentication Summit in Chicago.
Citing research figures from MarkMonitor, Craig Spiezle, director of technology care and safety for Microsoft, said that Sender ID use among Fortune 500 companies has increased from 7% in July 2005 to 21%. About 32% of all e-mail sent is Sender ID compliant, added Spiezle, who plans to speak about the adoption of Sender ID at the summit. more»
At the fourth annual MIT Spam Conference held in Boston Tuesday, speakers said that while the volume of spam ebbs and flows, the nature of unwanted email is steadily becoming more dangerous...
Fresh from an IETF meeting last week, Sendmail's Chief Science Officer Eric Allman spoke about the progress being made with DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), a sender-authentication proposal from Yahoo and Cisco that's wending its way through the standards body, and how it can be used to fight phishing. more»
The fight against spam, phishing and e-mail fraud should focus on economic incentives and aiding law enforcement, according to attendees at a conference examining the problem this week.
Speakers at MIT's 2006 Spam Conference were notably cognizant of the recent proposals of white lists and AOL's Goodmail, a pay per e-mail service offering preferential treatment in e-mail delivery for marketers. It is also one year since the implementation of Can-Spam, the federal law that sets e-mail marketing standards and makes it less complicated for law enforcement to go after John Doe spammers. more»
Australia has cracked down on junk mail with an industry code for tackling spam.
Under the new code, internet service providers (ISPs) will bear some of the responsibility for helping fight spam. Service providers must offer spam-filtering options to their subscribers and advise them on how to best deal with and report the nuisance mail. ISPs will also be compelled to impose "reasonable" limits on subscribers' sending email. more»
ISPs and e-commerce sites can employ more tools to combat phishing scams, including "white lists" of legitimate Websites and using false identification information to scam the scammers, according to a report released Thursday.
The report, released by a coalition of consumer groups, technology vendors, financial services organizations and law enforcement agencies, also calls on Internet companies to step up their consumer education efforts. more»
The UN on Wednesday recommended enforceable codes of conduct for ISPs as a way to cut down on spam.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN organization responsible for global telecoms standards, recommended that ISPs be required to enforce codes of conduct regarding their customers, and block spammers' email access. more»
China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has published a set of regulations that govern email services and include several provisions intended to cut down on the amount of spam that Chinese Internet users find in their in-box.
The new rules go into effect on March 30. As expected, the regulations require e-mail advertisements to include "AD" or the equivalent in Chinese characters (guang gao) in the subject header. They also require email service providers to register the IP addresses of their mail servers with the authorities. more»
Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers. America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a controversial system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely. more»
The amount of message board spam has been escalating dramatically since mid-2005, according to experts and a search of Google shows a number of frequently recurring domains are appearing in bogus comments on message boards all over the internet.
Domains such as 888.typo7.com, e-casinoroom.com, HobbyWorkshop.com, onlinepokerment.com, TopSitesRanking.com and g4h5.com all appear in bogus postings which reference online gaming. Many of the actual sites link through to more than one established poker site. more»
More than 5% of the net's most popular domains have been registered using "patently false" data, research shows.
A US congressional report into who owns .com, .net and .org domains found that many owners were hiding their true identity. The findings could mean that many websites are fronts for spammers, phishing gangs and other net criminals. more»
