You've Got Spam
Mass mailer is mass-mailed after internet backlash
If you've got a Hotmail account brimming with unsolicited advertising email - or spam, as it's known - then you might be interested to hear that one of the major spam generators was recently subjected to a lot of unsolicited post. After an interview with Alan Ralsky, who claimed that spamming people had made him a millionaire, was printed in the Detroit Free Press, his address was posted on over 100 websites. Viewers promptly signed him up for every kind of junk mail they could think of.
Ralsky spoke to the newspaper a week later, threatening legal action against the anti-spammers for harassment. Spam now accounts for 10-15 percent of all email recieved in the UK, and most email filtering services believe that much of it originates from a hard core of established companies. The industry has been becoming increasingly elaborate as more governments have been banning unsolicited advertising.
Many less ethical spammers have taken to including 'click here to unsubscribe' options in their messages, which in fact mark your email address as a higher target, as they know you are reading the mail and are worth spamming again. On the other side of the fence, filtering service Habeas has developed a system that implants Japanese haiku poetry into message headers to mark an email as spam free.
More Info: www.spamhaus.org
