CAUCE

Canadian Parliament Prorogated, Future of ECPA (Bill C-27) questionable

Parliament has been prorogated until March 2010, and it is unlikely (but not impossible) that the anti-spam bill, C-27 will survive the process. CAUCE will comment on this more fully in the new year, but while the delay is most unfortunate, this may not be an entirely bad situation.

The Conservatives will likely appoint five new Senators in the interim period, which would sway the balance of power in the Senate. There had been indications from Ms. Siobhan Coady (St. John's South—Mount Pearl, Lib.) that the Liberal party were intending to continue their run against the bill in Senate, and so this may work in favour of anti-spam legislation in Canada in 2010. It is our expectation that similar legislation would be re-introduced should C-27 die on the vine.

This Decade in Spam: 2007

Scott Richter made the news again in 2007, MySpace sued him for phishing and spamming their members. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission became active in shutting down pump & dump spamming organizations. Several major companies, including the Bank of America and Pfizer were found to be hosting zombie computers. Physician, heal thyself. New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore adopted anti-spam legislation. Penis pill pusher DM Contact Management settled their class-action lawsuit. Robert Soloway was arrested for spamming and a raft of other crimes. Mark Mumma lost his case against Cruise.com and the defendant is awarded $2,500,000 in damages. Jeremy Jaynes appealed his conviction. Canadian Xavier Ratelle was the first person charged under the U.S. Safe Web Act.

January 2007
Cisco bought IronPort (including SpamCop and SenderBase) for $830,000,000

The infamous 'hitman' spam circulated; a hitman threatens recipients will be killed unless they pay an extortion fee. Thus far, no-one has reportedly turned up dead.

Jeffrey Brett Goodin is found guilty of phishing AOL users under CAN-SPAM, faces 101 years in prison. Goodin was also convicted of 10 other counts, including wire fraud, misuse of the AOL trademark and attempted witness harassment.

The Storm virus was released, it infects 8% of all users within weeks.

MySpace sued Scott Richter for spamming and phishing under CAN-SPAM and California statutes.

Sophos found that in 2006, the United States at 34.2% of all sites containing malicious code, China hosted 31%.

South Korea arrested two un-named men for spamming and phishing

South Korea arrested a man identified only as 'Park' for spamming, he faces 3 years in prison and $31,000 in fines if convicted.

IBM warned of the emergence of the "exploits-as-a service" industry as cybercriminals organize into sophisticated malware manufacturing and distribution networks.

February 2007
OPTA won a spam case in The Netherlands, an unnamed man is fined $97,000.

Joshua Eveloff, 27, of Carter Lake, Iowa admits to spamming. He faces three years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000 for the crime, under CAN-SPAM. His partner, Michael Twombly, of Cardiff also plead guilty.

The Singapore anti-spam law went to Parliament.

Verizon Wireless won $200,000 in damages from Specialized Programming and Marketer, and its owner Charles Henderson.

The New Zealand Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act was passed by legislature.

Jeffrey Horton of Colorado won a class action lawsuit against DM Contact Management Ltd., a British Columbia corporation, Leading Edge Marketing Inc., a British Columbia corporation, Advanced Botanicals, Ltd., a British Columbia Corporation, Leading Edge Marketing Inc., a Bahamas corporation Leading Edge Marketing Inc., a Cyprus company,  Leading Edge Marketing Inc., a dissolved Colorado corporation, Technhpak, Llc, a Colorado limited liability company, and Unipay Processing, Ltd., a Cyprus company and Geoffrey M. Mackay, Andrew A. Mackay, Douglas R. Mackay, Mark D. Scheidt, Matthew Clayton, and Warren S. Brander. The penis enlargement pills sold through DM Contact Management, VigRX, apparently do not work as advertised.

March 2007
Gordon Dick of Edinburgh Scotland won £750 in damages and £616.66 for legal costs against British firm Transcom in Edinburgh's Sheriff Court.

The Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading for 35 companies engaged in pump & dump spam. As well, they froze the assets of phishers inflating stocks by way of breached user accounts at E-Trade, Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Scottrade, Vanguard Brokerage Services, Fidelity Investments and Merrill Lynch

Support Intelligence found that major companies such as Bank of America, Toshiba, AIG, and Business Week are hosting zombie computers on their networks.

April 2007
The New Zealand Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act came into force.

Australia's Telstra BigPond blocks gmail servers due to spam
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/security/telstra-google-in-spam-spat/2007/04/10/1175971083629.html

Singapore anti-spam law passed the vote in Parliament.

The Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading of Amerossi EC, Irwin Resources and Peopleline Telecom, 3 companies that trade on the Pink sheets, as part of a crackdown on suspected pump-and-dump trading schemes.

Project Honey Pot, a service of Unspam Technologies LLC filed a major lawsuit on behalf of their users against address harvesters.

May 2007
The Internet Engineering Task Force gave preliminary approval to DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).

Hong Kong implemented The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Ordinance. The maximum penalty for spamming offenses is a fine up to 1 million HK dollars and imprisonment up to five years.

Google purchased anti-spam/anti-virus technology company GreenBorder Technologies Inc.

Robert Alan Soloway is arrested in Seattle and he and his company, Newport Internet Marketing charged with mail fraud, identity theft, fraud and money laundering,  He is facing up to 65 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

MySpace settled with The Globe.com Inc. and won $5,500,000 in damages.

ClearMyMail said Talk Talk is the most spammed UK ISP.

Omega World Travel, and its subsidiary Cruise.com won the case filed against them by Mark Mumma and are awarded $2,500,000 in damages.

A class action suit was filed against TD Ameritrade Holding alleging company knew of a data breach for over a year.

June 2007
Spamhaus SURBL and URIBL were DDoSed

China launched an anti-spam website run by the Internet Society of China, iscbl.anti-spam.cn with black and whitelists of servers

Robert Soloway is denied bail
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/319682_spamking14.html

The U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona in Phoenix convicted Jeffrey A. Kilbride, 41, of Venice, California, and James R. Schaffer, 41, of Paradise Valley, Arizona, under CAN-SPAM.

Omega World Travel and Cruise.com see damages owed to them by Mark Mumma reduced to $330,000.

The Srizbi trojan was launched.

July 2007

A trojan called Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A was released. The malware creates Hotmail and Yahoo! accounts used to send spam.

The FTC held The Spam Summit Workshop

Darrel Uselton and his uncle, Jack Uselton were charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with fraud related to spammed pump & dump promotions. $4,200,000 is seized .

Law firm Azar & Associates' Barracuda appliance blocked e-mail from the United States District Court for the District of Colorado including a notification of a court date which the firm missed. They were ordered ordered to pay attorney fees and expenses incurred by the lawyers who showed up representing the other side of the case.

SpammerX published "Inside the Spam Cartel: Trade Secrets from the Dark Side".

Anti-spammer Patrick Peterson of Ironport was interviewed in Forbes.

Google acquired Postini.

August 2007

Nicholas Tombros of Venice California was sentenced to three years' probation and six months' home detention for spamming over open WIFI networks.

The biggest pump & dump spam run ever spiked volume by 445%.

September 2007
New Zealand's Unsolicited Electronic Messages (UEM) Act 2007 came into force.

Support Intelligence found Pfizer computers were compromised, and spamming illicit Viagra offers, for half a year.

Jeremy Jaynes appealed his conviction on the basis of free speech making the law unconstitutional.

Four months after a class-action lawsuit is filed over the incident, and apparently a year after they knew, TD Ameritrade admitted they were hacked, and had 6,000,000 email addresses stolen.

ISP Onetel's email service was unavailable for over a month due to spam attack on its 30,000 users.

October 2007
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading in three stocks, Alliance Transcription Services, Prime Petroleum Group and T.W. Christian,  for being "susceptible" to pump & dump scams.

The FTC filed charges under CAN-SPAM against Bruce Parker and Lisa Kimsey dba Spear Systems, Inc., and Canadian Xavier Ratelle dba eHealthylife.com. The action is the first brought by the agency under the U.S. Safe Web Act.

Jeffrey A. Kilbride of Venice, California, and James R. Schaffer of Paradise Valley, Arizona were sentenced to 72 months and 63 months respectively in prison for spamming pornography, conspiracy, money laundering, fraud and transportation of obscene materials. They also forfeited $1,300,000.

A keylogger was spammed using fake FTC graphics and a sending address.

MP3 spams were the hot new thing, after PDFs and Microsoft Word files began being filtered.

November 2007
A restraining order was issued against Sili Neutraceuticals dba Kaycon Ltd. and Brian McDaid when they were charged by the FTC under CAN-SPAM

Todd Moeller of New Jersey was sentenced to 27 months in prison for his part of a spam scheme that he ran with Adam Vitale of New York, hitting 1,200,000 AOL users.

Washington state Judge Judith Eiler ruled that spam is "personal e-mail" exempt from anti-spam laws if it’s written in a style that suggests familiarity with the recipient.

Spam Arrest won their five-year trademark case against Hormel, and the right to use 'spam' in their name.

December 2007
Adteractive Inc. settled with the FTC, paying $650,000 for deceptive spam

Colorado considered tougher anti-spam laws.

Min Kim of Colorado was sentenced to 30 months in prison for violating the CAN-SPAM act.

A court determined that spam is not illegal in Israel.

The New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs carried out anti-spam raids in Christchurch, seizing 22 computers that were part of an international spamming operation.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/email/news/article.cfm?c_id=188&objectid=10483539

This Decade in Spam: 2006

Spam grows 143% in 2006. Christopher 'Rizler' Smith threatens to kill a witness in his trial, Alan Ralsky partner Daniel Lin pleads guilty. Datran Media settles a lawsuit filed against them over what is called "the largest deliberate breach of Internet privacy discovered by U.S. authorities". Goodmail stuns California  senators, Blue Frog hops off into the sunset, pump & dump is discovered to increase stock prices. Sanford Wallace is fined for distributing spyware, AOL wants to dig up some turf. e360 Insight wins its case against The Spamhaus Project. Australia wins against Wayne Mansfield.

January 2006
Despite predictions, spam not dead. "We all maybe cringed a little bit when Bill (Gates) made that statement" said Ryan Hamlin, who heads anti-spam activities for Microsoft as general manager for Technology Care and Safety.

Postini claims between 2005 and 2006, the number of unsolicited e-mails increased 147 percent, and drew a map to prove it.

The Email Sender and Provider Coalition, American Advertising Federation, American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers Inc., Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy & Technology file an amicus brief regarding the Utah Child Protection Registry Act

CIS Internet Services owner Robert Kramer III was awarded $11,200,000,000 in damages in his case against James McCalla of Florida, who is also barred from accessing the Internet for three years. For those keeping track, Kramer has a net worth of over 12 billion dollars. Strangely, he does not make it on the Forbes list.

Daniel J. Lin pleads guilty to 3 felony counts related to spamming for his part in the Alan Ralsky spam gang. He is fined $20,000, and handed a sentence of between 2 years and 57 months.

Hong Kong begins public consultations on the proposed opt-out Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill

The Chinese Ministry of Information announced China will introduce anti-spam legislation in March, 2006.

Ironport's SenderBase adds URL tracking and Web reputation data filtering to the e-mail traffic monitoring network

Jeanson Ancheta pleads guilty U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to four felony charges for crimes that include infecting machines at two U.S. military sites with botnets. His plea agreement says he must serve four to six years in prison, forfeit a 1993 BMW and more than $58,000 in profit. He must also pay restitution of $19,000 US to the U.S. federal government for infecting the military computers.

Paul E. Burke, Wendy Burke, Seth T. Traub, Zhijian Chen, Manoj Kumar and Gary T. Preston are sued by the Washington state's attorney general for spamming and the dissemination of spyware on behalf of their company Secure Computer. This is the first case filed under state anti-spyware law.

A Maryland court determines that out-of-staters are liable to state anti-spam law. The case against Joseph M. Frevola and First Choice Internet Inc. moves forward.

Christopher William 'Rizler' Smith is found guilty under CAN-SPAM and ordered to pay $5,300,000 and $287,000 to AOL. His troubles are not over, as he is found to have attempted to have one of the prosecution witnesses killed, and is charged with that crime in March 2006.

February 2006
Outsourced 'Managed Service' style anti-spam filtering companies are the hot new thing MessageLabs, FrontBridge, Postini, BrightMail and MX Logic battle in the space.

Canadian Dale Begg-Smith is known as 'The Spam Man' in Australia. He remains uncharged for the activities.

Dutch police arrest a dozen Nigerians for sending 419 spam. The U.S. began extradition procedures for four of the principals.

AOL launches an $18 million lawsuit against 18 un-named phishers under the new Virginia law.

AOL announces it will begin charging legitimate businesses to send commercial e-mail to its users, by way of Goodmail Systems. The certified e-mail system would require advertisers to pay $2 to $3 per 1,000 messages. Yahoo! announces they too will be using Goodmail System's product for inbound commercial email.

Not everyone is in favour of the idea.

"It's taxation of the good guys with cash, and it does nothing to help the good guys who can't afford the cost or to deter the bad guys who spam anyway," says Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path, an e-mail services company.

"Baloney," says AOL's Nick Graham, scoffing at suggestions the e-mail system amounts to taxation. "That's competitive chatter and sour grapes."

March 2006
The Electronic Frontier Foundation launches DearAOL.com, a petition & website to convince AOL to kibosh the plan to use Goodmail Systems. AOL remains unconvinced, but agrees to let non-profit groups send email to them for free

Malware writers begin targeting developing nations because their computers are easy to infect.

Jennifer R. Clason of New Hampshire pled guilty to spam-related charges under CAN-SPAM in connection with a pornographic e-mail operation. Hers was the third-ever such conviction. Clason agreed to forfeit money obtained through the crimes and faced a maximum penalty of five years in prison for each of the offenses. The related trial of Jeffrey A. Kilbride and James R. Schaffer would take place in June 2006

China issued new spam regulations requiring a subject line tag, 'AD', for ISPs to register their IPs, and for them to retain logs for 60 days. It was noted that it was unclear what China considered to be illegal messages.

Microsoft calls for provisions for private right of action in Australia, under what the Australian Internet Industry Association the "toughest anti-spam legislation in the world".

Jumpstart Technologies LLC dba FreeFlixTix are found guilty under CAN-SPAM and fined $900,000 in a case filed by the FTC.

The New Zealand Communications Minister says international agreements are needed to effectively fight spam.

Datran Media agrees to a $1,100,000 settlement with New York state attorney general Eliot Spitzer in what is called "the largest deliberate breach of Internet privacy  discovered by U.S. authorities."

Datran explained their actions by noting "Datran never received financial data and never sent e-mails regarding discount price drugs and that although 6 million e-mails are involved, that doesn't represent 6 million people."

April, 2006
The FTC closes down third-party affiliate spammers Qing Kuang “Rick” Yang, and Peonie Pui Ting Chen, and wins fines of $2,400,000 against their companies Optin Global and Vision Media. They are also forced to disgorge $475,000 in spam-related profits.

A California Senate committee is stunned that Goodmail Systems Inc. is not designed to stop spam

At the second annual Email Authentication Summit Microsoft tried to drum up support for Sender ID. Gartner analyst Arabella Hallawell thinks that "DKIM has the most potential" among the email authentication schemes available.

Asia becomes the single largest source of spam according to Sophos.

Researchers Thorsten Holz and Rainer Böhme find that pump & dump stock spam work; the price of stock actually does increase, briefly.

May 2006
Blue Security's Blue Frog 'DDOS the spammers' service, created in July 2005, is allegedly threatened by a Russian spammer. BS then shut their doors saying they wish to avoid "an ever-escalating cyber war through our continued operations". The project goes open source, renamed Black Frog's Okopipi, and never heard from again.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) launched a downloadable spam button.

A day in the life of Matt Sergeant of Messagelabs (and CAUCE Board Member) published in the New York Times in a two part series.

The Kodak Imaging Network (formerly Ofoto) is fined an undisclosed amount under CAN-SPAM by the Federal Trade Commission.

Sanford Wallace is fined $4,089,500 for distributing spyware.

June 2006
Anti-spam vendor Vanquish and the Email Accountability Initiative come up with Bonded Sender, years after Ironport

Convicted under CAN-SPAM and fined by the Texas attorney general for $10,000,000 (and also by Microsoft), spammer Ryan Pitylak wants to become an anti-spammer.

Pitylak Security with no Alexa rank and last updated April 10, 2008, specializes in
Ryan Pitylak Viral Marketing
Ryan Pitylak Marketing Success
Ryan Pitylak Search Engine Optimization
and
Ryan Pitylak Demand Generation

French European MP Alain Lamassoure floats the idea of an email tax. The idea goes nowhere.

NetBop Technologies wins the right to use the word spam in the anti-spam product name 'bopspam', to which Hormel objected, on the basis of copyright. Hormel subsequently failed in an attempt to register Europe-wide trademarks asserting its right over the term "spam".

3 un-named men, forming the hacker group m00p, are arrested for releasing worms online. A 63 year old from England, a 28 year old from Scotland and a 19 year old from Finland. Discussion ensues as to the origin of the name, Seinfeld or Southpark.

Oh, noooo, I'm so sorry. It's the MOOPS. The correct answer is, 'the MOOPS'.

July 2006
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) announces that an addendum to the Australian 2003 Spam Act, a code of practice for Internet and email service providers comes into force.

Major League Baseball sells sponsorship of their all-star game voting to Monster.com. Voters are signed up to Monster.

Porn spam gets 280 times more action than other types, according to CipherTrust

Image spam becomes a serious problem according to anti-spam filter vendors. Spammers without access to Photoshop use Microsoft Word, instead.

Hong Kong's draft anti-spam law has provision for prison terms of up to ten years for spammers.

August 2006
A spam claiming to hold the truth behind the JFK assassination makes the rounds. So does a Skype / sypware phishing spam.

AOL wants the right to do some landscaping at Davis Wolfgang Hawke's parents house. To satisfy their win of $12,800,000 in fines against Hawke, they want to go looking, with a bulldozer, for some gold and platinum bars he allegedly buried under their lawn.

China fines their first spammer, a company in Shenzhen, $714 under the new state law.

Mocbot, a spam proxy Trojan, begins to spread.

McAfee SiteAdvisor is deployed.

September 2006
Jeremy Jaynes' conviction and sentence of nine years under Virginia state law is upheld. The defense indicate they intend to appeal again.

Robert McAllister, CEO of Millennium National Events Inc. is charged with fraud. The defendant claims the prosecution is politically motivated, under orders from Karl Rove and George W. Bush, because he spammed anti-Bush emails. The claim is dismissed.

OPTA, the Dutch Independent Regulator of Post and Telecommunications, and ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority cooperate in a bust of an Australian viagra spammer. The spammer apparently rented servers in The Netherlands to send the spam.

The Federal Trade Commission wins $400,000 in fines against Cleverlink Trading Ltd. and $151,000 against Zachary Kinion for violating CAN-SPAM.

Earthlink wins $11,000,000 under CAN-SPAM against KSTM.

e360 Insight wins against The Spamhaus Project who is ordered to pay $11,700,000 in damages. Spamhaus indicates they will continue to list e360 on the SBL, noting the Illinois court has no jurisdiction over the U.K.-based organization. e360 Insight requests the judge demand ICANN suspend The Spamhaus Project's domain spamhaus.org. The judge refuses to do so.

Botnets come of age, according to Pat Peterson of Ironport, who tracks spam runs coming from 100,000 hijacked home computers spread across 119 nations that land at 1,500 different payload sites.

Earthlink uncovers a phishing ring, Michael Dolan of North Miami Beach, Florida Charlie Blount Jr., of Branford, Connecticut, Keith Riedel of Winter Haven, Florida, Richard D'Andrea of West Haven, Connecticut, Thomas Taylor Jr. of West Haven, Connecticut and Daniel Mascia of West Haven, Connecticut are charged under the scheme.

October, 2006
Brian Michael McMullen, 22, of East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is sentenced to three years supervised release, five months home detention and ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $11,848.55 for violating CAN-SPAM.

The Federal Court of Australia fined Clarity1 $3,400,000 and its director Wayne Mansfield $760,000 for sending unsolicited e-mails in the first conviction under Australia's Spam Act of 2003.

November 2006
Spam levels reach new levels, between 89% and 97% of all email sent, up 143%  over the year previous. Ironport estimates 62,000,000,000 spam are sent daily and 85,000,000,000 are seen in one two-day period. The spike is attributed to 'durable botnets' facilitated by software like SpamThru.

In response, the OECD creates the StopSpamAlliance.org, along with the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC), the EU Contact Network for Spam enforcement Authorities (CNSA), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the London Action Plan for Spam Enforcement (LAP), and the Seoul-Melbourne MoU, and The European Commission called upon governments to be 'more active'. The ITU suggested even more international cooperation.

The FTC charged Yesmail Inc., doing business as @Once Corporation, with sending e-mail on behalf of its clients more than 10 business days after recipients had asked it to stop. Yesmail and the FTC settled the charges for $50,717.

December 2006
ORDB ceases operations as open relays are no longer being used to send spam.

Canada’s Voxbox World Telecom Inc. is seen in a pump & dump spam scam. Pink Sheets executives do nothing to address the issue.

Microsoft wins a summary judgment in the U.K. against Paul Martin McDonald and Bizads to prevent him from selling lists of Hotmail email addresses.

This Decade in Spam: 2005

2005 saw Scott Richter file bankruptcy to avoid paying fines, Alan Ralsky arrested, and CAN-SPAM evaluated for renovations. AOL gave away gold. Spammer gold.

January 2005
Earthlink wins their CAN-SPAM lawsuit against Damon DeCrescenzo and David Burstyn

Pump & Dump stock spam becomes very popular.

'97 per cent of unsolicited commercial email failed to comply with CAN-SPAM' - MX Logic CTO Scott Chasin, the law 'a miserable failure'

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued final regulations for those who wish to comply with CAN-SPAM.

Sanford Wallace promised to send spam and spyware (only to people who visit his Web sites).

The Federal Trade Commission files first-ever suit under CAN-SPAM 'sexually explicit' provisions against Global Net Solutions, Open Space Enterprises, Southlake Group, WTFRC dba Reflected Networks and Global Net Ventures.

Sunbelt Software began to provide anti-spyware services to anti-spam service Cloudmark.

Texas files a CAN-SPAM lawsuit against Ryan Samuel Pitylak, Mark Stephen Trotter PayPerAction, Leadplex LLC and Leadplex

Jeffrey Lee Parson sentenced to 18 months prison for writing Blaster worm

870,000 mobile spamming cases reported to the Korea Information Security Agency (KISA). The spam affects 95.8 users in Korea.

Verizon blocks email from Europe and Asia due to high levels of spam originating from the regions.

Yahoo & Google work with Six Apart and WordPress to attenuate blog comment spam

Georgia Slam Spam E-Mail Act proposes to make spam a felony. Earthlink likes the idea.

February 2005
Microsoft wins $1,2000,000 judgment against Levon Gillespie.

Spamming software SendSafe begins to use ISP's outbound email servers to send spam.

The Center for Excellence in Service of the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business and Rockbridge Associates says spam costs $21.58 billion in lost productivity, annually.

Former AOL engineer Jason Smathers pleads guilty to stealing information of 30,000,000 AOL users. The man he sold the data to, Sean Dunaway of Las Vegas, was yet to be charged.

Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands and Spain agree to work together to fight spam.

Microsoft and Pfizer file a CAN-SPAM lawsuit against the CanadianPharmacy and E-Pharmacy Direct.

Earthlink files a CAN-SPAM lawsuit against Christina Reese, Angela Nickerson, and YamboCS Inc.

Accused child kidnapper and rapist Ronald Scelson, aka the "Cajun Spammer," 'can't beat Postini filters', hands our business cards.

U.S. Attorney charges Anthony Greco of New York under CAN-SPAM with sending IM spam via MySpace.

The U.K. Office of Fair Trade announced a 48-hour crackdown on spam in partnership with the International Consumer Protection Enforcement Network and signatories to the anti-spam London Action Plan (LAP).

The Hong Kong Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology announced a new anti-spam initiative

The EU's 25 member states and 13 Asian partner countries agreed to boost legal tools to fight spam

March 2005
Jeremy Jaynes' sister, Jessica DeGroot's conviction for spamming over-turned

German mobile telephone operator Debitel fined 2,000,000 kroner for spamming competitor Danish mobile phone company Telmore.

The Japan E-mail Anti-abuse Group created.

Spam and phishing up in latter half of 2004, botnets down - Symantec

Scott Richter's Optinrealbig.com files for bankruptcy

IMDB deploys FairUCE, challenge-response issued to email with SPF failures.

April 2005
Microsoft files CAN-SPAM lawsuit against Scott Filary and Donald Townsend

Carsales.com.au loses first case filed under Australian anti-spam law, fined $6,600 AUS

Australia ends up back on the top 12 list of worldwide spam sources

The Federal Trade Commission's Deborah Platt Majoras thinks spam might be on the decline.

Jeremy Jaynes sentenced to nine years in prison for spamming. He remains free on a bond pending an appeal

The Federal Trade Commission files a CAN-SPAM lawsuit against Optin Global dba Vision Media Limited for spamming mortgage, car warranty and college degree offers.

Andrew Kantor, columnist on the CNN website, thinks spam will die out by itself.

Earthlink begins to require SMPT-AUTH

Spamhaus says U.K. anti-spam laws are useless

ISP Hypertouch files under CAN-SPAM against Kraft Foods Inc. for Gevalia coffee spam.

Hong Kong signs the Multilateral Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in Countering Spam with other Asia-Pacific signatories.

Return Path purchases Bonded Sender from Ironport. The deal comes just 10 months after Return Path's last acquisition, that of email list management provider NetCreations.

May 2005
AOL treats emergency e-mails as spam. No word on fate of Harvard admission emails.

UK ISP Telewest (aka Blueyonder) listed on SPEWS DNSBL for inordinate amounts of zombie computers. Telwest doesn't notice.

Massachusetts, helped by Microsoft, files a CAN-SPAM lawsuit against Leo Kuvayev, 2K Services Ltd., and ECash Pay Ltd. Also charged were Vladislav Khokholkov, Anna Orlova, Pavel Tkachuk, Michelle Marco, Dennis Nartikoev, and Pavel Yashin

Sober.q spams in support of ultra-right German political party

CAUCE gives CAN-SPAM a D- grade

18 months after CAN-SPAM comes into force, the Federal Trade Commission begins public consultation on improving the law.


The Federal Trade Commission and 35 government partners from more than 20 countries launch 'Operation Spam Zombies', suggesting ISPs close port 25, and sandbox zombie infected user computers.

The Federal Trade Commission files a CAN-SPAM lawsuit against Cleverlink Trading, Real World Media, Brian Muir, Jesse Goldberg and Caleb Wolf Wickman.

Developing countries suffer from spam disproportionately, according to the OECD

June 2005
The Canadian Task Force on Spam issues its final report noting the need for anti-spam laws in Canada.

HerbalKing Lance Atkinson and Jody Smith, Inet Ventures, Tango Pay, Click Fusion and TwoBucks Trading charged under CAN-SPAM

DomainKeys Identified Mail, borrowing elements from Yahoo's Domainkeys and Cisco's Internet Identified Mail system announced.

Borobt-Gen trojan announces Michael Jackson suicide.

State media in China announce Hong Kong will crack down on spam

Creaghan A. Harry agrees to turn over 10% of his ill-gotten gains to the Federal Trade Commission via $485,000 fine

Trend Micro buys Kelkea and MAPS. Unofficially known as the day the music is buried.

Hotmail releases its Smart Network Data Services

Wayne Mansfield charged under the Australian anti-spam act. He notes he made a staggering amount of money spamming.

Craig Spiezle, director of Microsoft's technology care and safety team, believes Hotmail should require Sender ID on all inbound email. The Internet disagrees "They will end up isolating and destroying their own mail services".

Joe Wagner & Hypertouch continue to rack up the CAN-SPAM cases, filing against Discover Financial Services, Link It Software, diploma mill Kennedy-Western University  and Stamps.com

Peter Moshou pleads guilty to a civil lawsuit filed by Earthlink. An article also notes that Nicholas Tombros was the first criminal conviction under the federal CAN-SPAM law. Moshou faces 3 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

Microsoft Sender ID alliance a failure - Washington Post MX Logic says 'spammers the most likely participants in SPF and Sender ID deployment'

AOL, Yahoo! Microsoft and Earthlink discuss DKIM vs. Sender ID. Again.

The Chinese government joins the London Action Plan. Again.

Michigan and Utah Child Protection registry and 'do not email' laws come into effect.

July 2005
Christopher 'The Rizler' Smith arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) for spamming; Burnsville Internet and Xpress Pharmacy Direct shut down.

Blue Security's Blue Frog software released, warns spammers to 'stop it'. if they don't Blue Frog launches a denial of service attack against them.

BangBros.com (fined $650,000), APC Entertainment (fined $220,000), MD Media (fined $238,743) Pure Marketing Solutions and Matrix Technology (fined $50,000) reach settlements with the Federal Trade Commission over their spamming activities

The U.S. Department of Justice indicates it is filing CAN-SPAM suits against TJ Web Productions Cyberheat and Impulse Media

Scott Richter is taken off the ROSKO list

422 new vulnerabilities were discovered in the second quarter of 2005 - SANS

Opt-in New Zealand legislation Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill begins final deliberations in legislature.

The Virginia State anti-phishing law came into force

July 2005
Microsoft and Scott Richter settle their lawsuit for a full settlement of $7,000,000. Microsoft’s senior vice president and general counsel, Brad Smith notes “Because of this litigation, Mr. Richter has fundamentally changed his practices and forfeited ill-gotten gains. Microsoft looks forward to a permanent change in Mr. Richter’s practices.” Mr. Richter was subsequently sued by MySpace for spamming and phishing in 2008.

AOL raffles $20,000 in gold bars, a 2003 Hummer H2 and $75,000 in cash it seized from spammer Brad Bournival. He had purchased the email lists stolen by Jason Smathers, for $28,000. Smathers is sentenced to 15 months in prison. One million people enter the sweepstakes, 53-year-old welder Marc Daniels wins the prizes.

Florida considers criminal provisions for proposed anti-spam law.

Scott Levine and Snipermail.com charged with stealing data from Acxiom. Six employees plead guilty.

Three charged, one pleads guilty in first CAN-SPAM case on 'sexually explicit' tagging. Jennifer Clason, Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer sent spam via The Netherlands.

Vardan Vardanovich Kushnir, a spammer targeting Russians, is found murdered in his Moscow apartment.

September 2005
Verizon Wireless files CAN-SPAM suit against Intelligent Alternatives of San Diego, California, and Resort Marketing Trends of Coral Springs, Florida.

Irish firm 4’s a Fortune becomes first win with Irish anti-spam law, fined 1,500 euro + 1,000 euro court costs. a Fortune is "Irelands first online casino-like cash game".

Spamhaus believes Yahoo! supports online scams.

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and the Attorney-General's Chambers release draft anti-spam legislation for public consultation.

Sender reputation is first mentioned in the popular press.

An Arizona court makes cell-phone spam a crime

October 2005
Mobile networks seen to be vulnerable to denial of service attack by spam

Anti-spyware bills abound in U.S. congress WhenU (a company that surreptitiously install software on user computers) CEO Avi Naider supports a federal law.

Leo Kuvayev's websites ordered shut down, fined $37,000,000 under CAN-SPAM. CAUCE notes 'CAN-SPAM has not had a visible effect on the amount of spam on the Internet'.

U.K. citizen Peter 'Weaselboy' Francis-Macrae arrested for spam, fraud, and threatening to kill police officers

Alan M. Ralsky and Scott Bradley arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for spamming

30% of UK firms found to 'ignore spam laws'

Anthony Greco sentenced for spamming MySpace users via IM. The sentence is under seal.

The Direct Marketing Association requires its members to adopt email authentication (DKIM or Sender ID). Either one. or both. Whatever.

Microsoft identifies 13 different spamming operations using botnets. Microsoft tests an infected zombie PC; it sends 18 million e-mail messages over 5 million different connections. In three weeks.

Dutch botnet herders controlling 1,500,000 computers arrested, not named.

Asia called the 'Spam Factory of the World' by Business Week magazine.

November, 2005
The Zlob trojan is released into the wild

Jared Cosgrave and Mohammed Haque charged with CAN-SPAM violations by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).

Dutch enforcement agency OPTA wins case against unidentified drug spammer, fine set at $97,000 for sending 9,000,000,000 spam eamils.

U.K. Office of Fair Trade warns UK company Dropshippers from selling on lists of 3 million bogus 'opt-in' email addresses to potential spammers on its website. They comply.

Pfizer launches anti-Viagra-spam radio campaign in Holland.

Peter 'Weaselboy' Francis-Macrae jailed for six years in U.K. for spam scams

U.K. residents David Levi and Guy Levi are sentenced to four years and 23 months in prison respectively for phishing eBay

Verizon Wireless files CAN-SPAM suit against Passport Holidays

December 2005
Pump & Dump spam complaints to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission double in 2005

Scott J. Filary and Donald E. Townsend issued an permanent injunction and fined $50,000 for spamming

Scottish government admits their anti-spam laws are weak Sean Connery makes no comment.

New Zealand anti-spam legislation nears adoption

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) claims, but fails to prove, CAN-SPAM effectiveness. Anti-spammers skeptical of any positive claims.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority forces ISPs to attack spam; they must proactively scan traffic for open relays and botnets, networks of compromised PCs used for sending spam. In addition, spam filters must be offered and clearly advertised by each Australian ISP.

White Buffalo Ventures, dba LonghornSingles.com fails in bid to force the University of Texas to allow them to spam their users.

Billy W. Williams charged with spamming under CAN-SPAM.

Florida gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist accused of spamming in support of his campaign. 'It's not spam, its free speech' his campaign manager claims.

China 'cracks down on cell-phone spam' by requiring prepaid cell-phone subscribers to register their devices using their real names.

New Zealand ISP Telstra's Clear service slowed to a crawl due to spam.

This Decade in Spam: 2004

2004 saw Bill Gates make an infamous prediction, CAN-SPAM came into play and is immediately criticized by those who must enforce it, DomainKeys & Sender ID battle it out in a popularity contest, and penis enlargement pills may not work as advertised. Scott Richter appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, debates a spam cop, and goes into the shmata business. None end well.

January 2004
January 01, 2004 CAN-SPAM came into effect. Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig calls it "an abomination at the federal level"

AOL notes that they blocked half a trillion spam emails from their systems in 2003

Bill Gates proclaims that the spam problem will be solved in two years. Penny Black, charging spammers for each mail they send, revealed.

"Re-imagining the Ordovician Gothic: Fossils from the Golden Age of Spam" goes on display in New York

The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) continues work on new technical standards to stop spam.

Mydoom virus released into the wild.

February 2004
The Federal Trade Commission calls CAN-SPAM "a mild deterrent"

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development begins work against spam

The Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) published a survey noting that 52% of consumers were using the Internet less due to spam.

The words "Berkshire", "Marriott", "wireless", "touch" and "comment" are found to help bypass Baysean anti-spam filters.

Jeffrey Horton of Colorado files a class action lawsuit against DM Contact Management Ltd., a British Columbia corporation, Leading Edge Marketing Inc., a British Columbia corporation, Advanced Botanicals, Ltd., a British Columbia Corporation, Leading Edge Marketing Inc., a Bahamas corporation Leading Edge Marketing Inc., a Cyprus company,  Leading Edge Marketing Inc., a dissolved Colorado corporation, Technhpak, Llc, a Colorado limited liability company, and Unipay Processing, Ltd., a Cyprus company and Geoffrey M. Mackay, Andrew A. Mackay, Douglas R. Mackay, Mark D. Scheidt, Matthew Clayton, and Warren S. Brander. He claims the penis enlargement pills sold through DM Contact Management, VigRX, do not work as advertised.

TurnTide garners $1,100,000 in financing for their anti-spam router

AOL sues Charles Henry Miller, Jonathan Beyer, Joseph Conrad and Connor Miller Software under CAN-SPAM..

Earthlink sues Rockin Time Holdings, Damon DeCrescenzo and David Burstyn under CAN-SPAM.

Microsoft deploys 'caller ID for email'.

Sophos says America is the source of half the spam on the Internet.

Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path notes that valid email tagged as spam, false positives are 'a real problem'; a study shows 20% of legitimate email never makes it to the inbox.

March 2004
EarthLink, MSN, Yahoo! and AOL note that they each filter 2 billion pieces of spam, daily.

Scott Richter appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Clitorious cream sales fail to spike.

Hypertouch files the first-ever CAN-SPAM suit against BVWebTies dna BobVila.com and its marketing affiliate BlueStream Media

Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo! and Earthlink file coincidental CANSPAM suits against spammers. Yahoo's suit is against Canadians Eric Head, Matthew Head, and Barry Head, the unfortunately-named Head Gang.

AOL begins preventing their members from connecting to spammed websites

AOL gives away a 2002 Porsche Boxster won in spam settlement to 73 year-old Charles S. Chase.

April 2004
The EU issues a final warning to France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Finland, Greece, the Netherlands and Portugal for failure to create anti-spam laws in keeping with the EU directive.

Sasser worm released into the wild, taking Delta Airlines offline

Spamhaus applies to ICANN to develop the .mail TLD.

Buffalo spammer Howard Carmack found guilty in New York, sentenced to 3 1/2 to 7 years in prison for identity theft

Scott Richter comes out with a SPAM clothing line

Sendmails Corp. deploys VirtualMDA, offering to pay users to spam on behalf of others.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission files its first CAN-SPAM suit against Christopher Chung, Daniel Lin, James Lin, and Mark Sadek. Chung and Sadek are arrested.

May 2004
Canadian Industry Minister Lucienne Robillard announced the formation of a task force to combat spam. CAUCE is heavily involved in the process.

Microsoft begins using IronPort's Bonded Sender as whitelist on inbound email.

Yahoo! releases DomainKeys technical specification

Symantec acquires Brightmail.

An FTC rule requiring a subject line tag "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT" for dirty emails goes into effect.

Spammer Scott Richter and SpamCop's Julian Haight, whom Richter sued for blocking his mail, debate.

Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee calls for more enforcement of the CAN-SPAM act. McCain is never heard from again.

Accused child rapist and spammer Ronnie Scelson claims he is '100% legal' with CAN-SPAM but driven 'underground'.

"CAN-SPAM was the right bill at the right time for all the right reasons," said Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of America Online. Consumers Union president James Guest disagrees.

Microsoft hires private detectives to become part of their anti-spam research team.

June 2004
Washington state wins the appeal filed by Jason Heckel. Heckel is ordered to pay a $2,000 fine for spamming. And $96,197 in legal costs.

Comcast blocks port 25 on their systems, they are the first ISP of any significant size to do so.

Singapore considered draft spam laws.

Microsoft merges 'caller ID for email' scheme with Sender Policy Framework (SPF), SenderID born.

Maryland invokes new anti-spam legislation.

MAPS becomes a division of Kelkea, Inc. Unofficially, the day the music died.

Nucleus Research says spam costs employers $1,934 per employee annually

Microsoft files suit against "8 spammers"

The Direct Marketing Association's Jerry Cersale discusses CAN-SPAM, the legal comb-over,  on the Washington Post website

Scott Richter issued legal threat by Hormel to cease and desist use of their trademark, SPAM. Richter's clothing line folds.

Microsoft and Yahoo! agree to try DomainKeys and SenderID, respectively. They don't, really.

The Anti-Spam Technical Alliance (ASTA) forms,  with membership from Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, Earthlink, British Telecom, and Comcast. ASTA eventually becomes MAAWG.org

A Russian teenager becomes the first person convicted in Russia for spamming.

20% of U.S. residents admit buying products advertised in spam.

July 2004
The United Nations wants to standardize anti-spam laws.

The US, UK and Australia sign a memorandum of understanding for international anti-spam investigation cooperation, in what eventually leads to the formation of the LondonActionPlan.org

A California court finds Daniel Khoshnood and Pointcom guilty of spamming, Microsoft wins a $4,000,000 settlement.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1013738/microsoft-gets-four-million-dollars-for-spam

Scott Richter and OptInRealBig.com agreed to pay a $40,000 fine for spamming and $10,000 toward the investigative cost to the state of New York

The Australian Communications Authority (ACA) notes a dramatic drop in Australian spam since their opt-in anti-spam law was adopted.

Verizon Wireless files suit against Jacob Brown and 50 unidentified individuals for mobile spamming.

The Federal Trade Commission files suit against Creaghan A. Harry, winning a TRO to shut his spamming activities down.

August 2004
AOL buys Mailblocks, who had previously sued Earthlink for patent violation.

Pfizer begins legal pursuits against Viagra spammers

The OECD set up an anti-spam task force.

Microsoft holds a meeting with the E-Mail Service Provider Coalition to convince them to use Sender ID

Cisco acquires anti-spam unknown start-up P-Cube for $200,000,000.

Vundo worm aka the Virtumundo worm is released into the wild.

The Australian Prime Minister spams his constituents via loophole in the anti-spam law.

Eileen Harrington, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission's consumer protection bureau discusses CAN-SPAM with the Washington Post readers.

September 2004
The Apache Software Foundation and the Debian Project reject the Microsoft Sender ID standard. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) follows suit. The IETF subsequently disbands the MARID anti-spam group.

Savvis disgorges itself of spammers, after a member of their postmaster team, Alif Terranson submits a 200-page report to management, then Spamhaus. Spamhaus shows them the error of their ways.

Microsoft files suit against Cheapbulletproof.com, and nine others.

Microsoft and Amazon file against Gold Disk Canada (The Head Gang, against whom Yahoo! filed earlier in the year) for phishing. Canada continues to study the problem.

Microsoft files a lawsuit against Leonid Radvinsky, Activsoft Inc. and Cybertania Inc.

The FTC suggests congress consider putting a bounty of spammers' heads to better secure public cooperation which they feel is lacking.

October 2004
In the another round of CAN-SPAM lawsuits, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo! and Earthlink file coincidental lawsuits against spammers, mostly John Does. Yahoo!'s suit names East Coast Exotics Entertainment Group Inc. and Epoth LLC

The London Action Plan is kicked off with 27 countries present, China promises to support the initiative.

AOL says it might love Microsoft's Sender ID, after all.

The trial of Jeremy Jaynes, his sister Jessica DeGroot and Richard Rutkowski vs. AOL begins

November 2004
Jeremy Jaynes found guilty, sentenced to nine years in prison, Jessica DeGroot fined $7,500, Richard Rutkowski acquitted.

Yahoo! deploys DomainKeys in earnest on outbound mail.

Former Spam King Sanford Wallace found guilty of distributing spyware

Microsoft spams Bob Poortinga, who tells the Washington Post about it.

Delf-HA Trojan released into the wild, has SMS spam payload.

FTC holds 'Authentication Summit'. Companies asked to 'work together'. Kumbaya not sung.

Earthlink deploys Yahoo!-championed authentication scheme DomainKeys on outbound mail.

Lycos Europe deploys a screensaver that launches distributed denial of service attacks against spammer sites.

December 2004
SPAMCON Foundation President Laura Atkins determines that after a year in play CAN-SPAM is ineffective.

Microsoft files more John Doe CAN-SPAM suits against spammers for breaking Sexually Explicit provision of CAN-SPAM.

The Maryland anti-spam law is deemed unconstitutional; case against Joseph Frevola dismissed.

Bloggers note an uptick in blog comment spam. A new channel comes of age.

Former AOL engineer Jason Smathers pleads guilty to stealing 92,000,000 screen names and email accounts. His plea is rejected by the judge.

AMP Dollar Savings Inc., Cash Link Systems Inc.and TEI Marketing Group ordered to pay a total on $1,000,000,000,000 (one billion) fine to Robert Kramer owner of Iowa-based ISP CIS. Business Week writes up the case.

This Decade in Spam: 2003

2003 was the year of CAN-SPAM, AMEY (AOL, Earthlink, Microsoft & Yahoo!) legal initiatives, the FTC Spam Conference, Scott Richter being sued for spamming, and the Sobig and Blaster viruses.

January 2003
Ferris Research notes that spam costs U.S. corporations $8.9 billion per year

SQL Slammer virus released, infects 75,000 victims within minutes.

A Harris Interactive poll of 2,221 people indicate that at least 70% favour a government ban on spam

Sobig variant A released into the wild. the worst is yet to come.

Turing tests, in the form of CAPTCHAs, deployed. The blind are annoyed.

The first annual spam conference at MIT takes place. Attendee notes:  "I think we need legislation protecting good faith efforts to stop spam" - Joshua Goodman, a Microsoft researcher

AT&T invokes rDNS requirement for inbound email in attempt to block spam, after 24 hours of high false positives, backs off the rule

In a ruling in the New York state attorney general Spitzer vs. Monsterhut case Justice Lottie E. Wilkins of the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan ordered Monsterhut Inc. and its executives to stop committing "fraudulent, deceptive and illegal acts".

Verisign company Network Solutions mails its customer list to a 'few thousand' of its customers.

The Direct Marketing Association sues the U.S. government to prevent the creation of an opt-out 'do not email' list

February 2003
American states Colorado and Missouri consider 'do not email' lists

A Public Opinion Strategies poll indicates that 90% of Americans polled support legislation "that would require warning labels on sexually explicit or pornographic spam and establish criminal penalties for spam that contains misleading information about the identity of the sender".

Microsoft files several 'john doe' lawsuits against Hotmail dictionary attacker spammers, indicates they will file three more similar lawsuits.

Barry Shein, president of the Boston-area ISP The World suggests legalizing spam charging spammers for its distribution. Bill Gates eventually floats the same idea a year later, which he calls Penny Black. Neither initiative go anywhere.

Microsoft attempts to dilute Washington state law against spam.

AOL & Microsoft support federal legislation against spam.

March 2003
The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) convenes the Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG).

AOL blocks 1 Billion spam in a 24 hour period.

Utah court dismisses the Terry Gillman vs. Sprint Communications class-action lawsuit. Gillman had signed up for 3rd party offers on a website, who sold his address to Sprint.

Hotmail limits the number of email users can send to 100, down from 500 per day

The United Kingdom considers an anti-spam law. The government takes in consultations from industry.

Salon features a day in the life of a spam fighter, Suresh Ramasubramanian

Japanese mobile phone carrier DoCoMo wins $54,000 USD against mobile phone spammers. The Internet does not record who lost the money, or the case.

April 2004
SEC sues Jonathan Randall Curshen for pump & dump using spam

Burns and Wyden reintroduce CAN-SPAM anti-spam legislation in the American senate

AOL files first suit against spammers since January 2001 against Michael Levesque and George A. Moore Jr. CAUCE makes note of the need for federal legislation.

Symantec files suit against Maryland Internet Marketing, George "Dr. Fatburn" Moore and John Smitherine

FTC files against Brian Westby after having received 46,000 complaints, for failing to honor an unsubscribe request.

Danish company Fonn Danmark found guilty of violating Denmark anti-spam law , fined $2,000

Australia makes note of intentions to introduce anti-spam legislation

NetGlobalMarketing CEO (and former Geraldo Rivera producer) Alyx Sachs, now a spammer, interviewed in the New York Times.

Server Beach disconnects 89 Web sites operated by US Moneywerx, a spammer, based upon information from SPEWS.org. NetGlobalMarketing was a client of Moneywerx.

Virginia introduces a statute making spam that involves fraud a felony

Senator Charles Schumer introduces legislation in American Senate, forges alliances with conservatives, including 'do-not-email' provisions.

May 2003
the U.S. Federal Trade Commission holds a Spam Forum. Spammers, anti-spammers attend. Fisticuffs narrowly averted as EMarketersAmerica.org files suit against several anti-spammer in attendance.

MailBlocks sues Earthlink for violating anti-spam technology patents

CAUCE notes in the Washington Post that some blacklists become "little more than tools for people's personal vendettas."

EarthLink wins $16M Judgment from 'Buffalo Spammer' Howard Carmack who is subsequently arrested for fraud related to his spamming activities.

17 law enforcement agencies and the Federal Trade Commission issued a public warning about open relays in 11 languages. Open relays are noted to be significantly on the wane, and open proxies and other hacking techniques far more prevalent as a way to send spam.

Congressional hearings at the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation take place. Bill Gates does not attend, but sends a letter of support.

The Internet Engineering Task Force Anti-Spam Research Group indicate they expect quick results from their efforts

First editorial noting U.S. Senate bill (that which eventually become CAN-SPAM) would legalise spamming.

June 2003
The FTC asks congress for expanded rights to work internationally to fight spam

Microsoft "mistakenly" sued Simon Grainger for spamming. 14 other lawsuits stand

Yahoo! filters FTC do-not-call notifications to bulk folder

Robert Fleming, president of the eMarketing Association feels that the spam threat is 'overblown'

Ronnie Scelson, charged a year earlier with molesting, illegally detaining and raping a teenage girl claims 'at least he is not a spammer' in USA Today. Alan Ralsky suggests Scelson keep a lower profile.

Senate Commerce Committee unanimously approved the Burns-Wyden 'Can Spam Act'

July 2003
UK holds All Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG) Spam Summit

AOL adds IM and chat anti-spamming provisions to their Terms of Service

Robert Wientzen, president of the Direct Marketing Association defines spam as "e-mail that misrepresents an offer or misrepresents the originator--or in some way attempts to confuse or defraud people."

Venture capital into anti-spam software firms spikes.

AOL has 18 people working in their anti-spam group. Indiana University spends $1,200,000 on mail software that is overwhelmed by email volume within 3 years of deployment.

PC Magazine asks if Challenge/Response will save the world from spam. The world doesn't respond, neither does spam.

Hormel files first initiatives to protect its trademark SPAM, asking people to use lower-case to refer to email.

August 2003
Amazon.com files lawsuit against Enzymatic Therapy. Mistakenly.

Sobig F released, sets record for sheer number of emails.

A study noted that 14 billions spam are sent daily. Earthlink notes that spam cost it $5,000,000 in damages

August 11 Blaster worm released; August 29 - Jeffrey Lee Parson arrested for Blaster worm.

Operation Slam Spam, a cooperation between the Direct Marketing Association and the Federal Bureau of Investigation begins.

September 2003
Texas launches law requiring spam to have subject labeling. The state attorney general makes note it may be difficult to file charges under the law

The alliance between viruses and spam noted to be causing mayhem.

The Internet Society of China blocks 225 spam servers and comes under attack by spammers.

Verisign launches Site Finder service, redirects typo'ed urls to advertisements.

The United Kingdom makes spam a criminal offence

Anti-spam blacklists come under denial of service attacks from zombie'd computers

ROKSO spammer Richard Colbert is interviewed in the New York Times

Alleged EMarketersAmerica.org mastermind (and convicted cocaine salesman) Eddy Marin forges domains into spam.

California upgrades its anti-spam law. CAN-SPAM renders it moot.

October 2003
FTC Chairman Timothy Muris makes comments about the agency's anti-spam initiatives in Apsen.

Phillip Nixon sued under Missouri state anti-spam law
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2003-10-09-mo-spammers-sued_x.htm

California wins $2,000,000 judgment against PW Marketing, owners Paul Willis and Claudia Griffin. They are forbidden from engaging in Internet marketing for a decade.

U.S. Senate passes anti-spam CANSPAM legislation with a vote of 97-0, Information Week says 'the bill's enforcement is questionable'. David Kramer, attorney, says "The American people deserve better than this poor excuse, spawned by the marketing industry." CAUCE agreed.

Big companies add to spam, according to the New York Times

EU Anti-spam directive comes into force.

Sober worm released into the wild.

November 2003
Brightmail says 'Half of all email is spam' (up from 8% they saw a little over a year previous).

USA Today notes that "Marketers (are) trying to influence Congress on spam"

Bill Gates writes a piece for the Washington Post supporting the CAN-SPAM Act

Charles T. Booher threatens to kill Canadian Douglas Mackay, CEO of DM Contact Management Inc. for spamming him. DM Contact claims affiliates, not they, are responsible for the spam.

The Can-Spam Act of 2003 was passed by a vote of 392-5 by the house of representatives. "For the first time during the Internet era, American consumers will have the ability to say `no' to spam," said Representative Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican and head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

December 2003
Australia opt-in Spam Bill 2003 becomes law.

W32/Mimail-L virus targets anti-spam organizations

George W. Bush signs CAN-SPAM bill into law. A CNN Columnist notes CAN-SPAM probably won't work. A Washington Post columnist agrees

New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer and Microsoft file lawsuits against Synergy6 Inc., OptInRealBig.com, and Scott Richter.

The EMarketersAmerica.org bid to sue anti-spammers is thrown out of court, anti-spammers out-of-pocket for legal defense.

AOL case against four Florida-based email administrators allegedly helping spammers thrown out of Virginia court on technicality

Virginia files charges against Jeremy Jaynes and Richard Rutowski. Spamhaus lists Jaynes as one of the ten largest spammers, worldwide

Yahoo! notes the development of Domain Keys technology.

This Decade in Spam: 2002

2002 marks a year when politicians Sean Connery, Bill Jones & Elizabeth Dole used spam to various effect, Ellen Spertus won $4.26 in her suit against a spammer, Joey McNichol was sued for calling someone a spammer in Australia, and Joel Hodgell lost a case and had to pay a spammer's legal fees. The FTC determined that unsubscribing from spam did nothing positive nor negative, Bonded Sender, Habeas, and Cloudmark all launched their services.

January 2002
The Direct Marketing Association creates mandatory ground rules "Commercial Solicitations Online Guidelines" for members sending e-mail. DMA VP Jerry Cerasale noted "We view spam as sending a commercial e-mail to someone with whom a marketer has not had any prior business relationship and as being sent to someone who has not asked for the e-mail, these rules are the bottom line, the lowest common denominator." The DMA issues the guidelines to their members in February.

CAUCE questions The DMA's ability and willingness to enforce their own rules. CAUCE is proven right, again, in the fullness of time, when the rules have little effect on DMA members.

A California appellate court overturned a June 2000 decision deeming the CA anti-spam law unconstitutional; spam must have subject line tags. Ferguson vs. Friendfinder & Conru Interactive moves forward. CAUCE applauds the decision.

Ellen Spertus wins $4.26 against Kozmo using California anti-spam law.

AOL accidentally blocks Harvard early admissions emails. Harvard is not currently on any commercial email whitelists.

Bernard Shifman becomes a moron spammer. UPDATE: Bernard Shifman reformed his ways, asked politely, and I removed all relevant content from my site about a year ago - neil schwartzman

TRUST-e launches Trusted Sender email seal program. Within weeks, there are complaints about spam being sent with the seals, and poor compliance actions taken by TRUST-e.

Tom Geller steps down as Director of the SPAMCON Foundation

February 2002
The FTC launched a crackdown on deceptive junk e-mail

Spain began to consider anti-spam legislation

Spam from China became a serious issue

California gubernatorial candidate Bill Jones spams all the way to Canada, is blocked, calls his email 'free speech. Mr. Jones loses the spam, and gubernatorial campaigns.

Millions of AT&T customers' email was slowed due to spam

March 2002
Spam to corporate sites begins to become dire (warning: contains quotes from CAUCE board member Chris Lewis)

A debate organized by the Libertarian (and rabidly anti-anti-spam law) CATO Institute sees participants lambasting the DMA and CATO's proposed approach to spam.

April 2002
The FTC's International Netforce launches a law enforcement effort against deceptive spam and Internet fraud

AOL settles their case against Netvision Audiotext dba Cyber Entertainment Network. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

The FTC determines that unsubscribing from spam email does nothing - it does not unsubscribe victims from the email stream, nor does it 'confirm' the email and result in more spam, contrary to popular wisdom.

Lawfirm Morrison and Foerster (aka MoFo) files against self-proclaimed DMA member Etracks under California anti-spam law. The DMA refers the matter to their legal department. CAUCE supports the legal initiative.

Napster founder Jordan Ritter makes noises about an anti-spam tool, Folsom, that eventually becomes Cloudmark

Lotus Notes developer Ray Ozzie makes noises about an anti-spam tool, Groove, that eventually goes nowhere.

FTC files against Rik Covell and Adam Lewis dba BTV Industries; National Communications Team; LO/AD Communications; and Nicholas Loader for bait & switch spam scam.

Brightmail notes a 600% increase in spam volumes over the previous year.

May 2002
Tidbits.com survey finds 31% received more than 100 spam messages per week, 27% receiving 20 or fewer per week, 42% see between 21 and 100 spams per week.

Motorola wins their spam lawsuit against Paging America

Burns-Wyden Can-Spam bill passed out of the Commerce Committee. Burns drops to column in CNET

Australian firm The Which Firm dba T3 Direct sues Joseph (Joey) McNichol for having complained about spam online, resulting in them being listed on the SPEWS DNSBL.
CAUCBE (CAUCE Australia) sets up a legal defense fund)

USENET Death Penalty issued against UK ISP Telewest

New York State attorney general Eliot L. Spitzer files against MonsterHut.com for spamming 750,000 victims.

The European Parliament adopts an opt-in anti-spam directive.

June 2002
Sean Connery spams in support of his possible run for Scottish parliament. Roger Moore becomes CAUCE favourite Bond.

Spamfighting begins to use cloud computing: Cloudmark Spamnet launched, allowing individual users to vote email as spam.

R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has his name forged in the from line of a spam for sexy screen savers.

Ironport Bonded Sender program launches.

July 2002
Brightmail spots 5,000,000 unique spam runs, 8 times as many as the year previous.

Connecticut State anti-spam law comes into force, joining 21 other U.S. state laws.

9/11 scam spammer Ronnie Scelson arrested, charged with molesting, illegally detaining and raping a teenage girl. Spammers hits an all-time low.

August 2002
Washington state wins their case against Jason Heckel, spammer fined $98,000

Paul Graham, the co-creator of what is now the Yahoo Store, launches first manifestos about baysean spam filters. They work. For a while.

A class-action lawsuit, Terry Gillman v. Sprint Communications is launched in Utah, asserting that Sprint failed to use the subject line tag "ADV." in mailings. The Utah law came into force May 08.

Optix Pro trojan released

Lyris' SparkList service subscription lists hacked, 2,000,000 addresses stolen.

Joel Hodgell loses case filed in Washington State against Daniel Amato, George Amato and  Samson Distributing, also known as SDI Labs, in King County District Court's small-claims division in Seattle. Hodgell forced to pay $7,000 for Amato's legal costs.

September 2002
Consumer Lobbyists Telecommunications Research and Action Center accused of spamming. Falsely.

AOL Time Warner, Verizon, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, and the Direct Marketing Association's lobbying of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce against spam law begins in earnest.

California adopts anti-spam for mobile phones law.

The California attorney general files an anti-spam suit against Paul Willis and Claudia Griffin, and PW Marketing accusing the company of illegally spamming millions of Californians.

October 2002
Verizon settles their lawsuit against Alan Ralsky. Under the terms of the settlement, Ralsky is no longer allowed to mail Verizon customers.

Windows messaging system pop-up spam spotted for the first time

Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon proposes an anti-spam law

Beast trojan released

The DMA comes out in favour of an anti-spam law. Spammer Thomas "Empire Towers" Cowles voices his support for their approach, which eventually becomes the CAN SPAM act.

The EU opt-in anti-spam directive comes into effect.

November 2002
U.S. Federal, State, and local law enforcers tackle deceptive spam and Internet scams. Again.

FTC files against GM Funding, for failing to honor an unsubscribe request.

MessageLabs says spam volume "drastically increased" during 2002. In January 2002, the company identified approximately one in every 199 UK e-mails as spam. In June, this figure was one in 36. But figures for November suggest a rate of one in eight. September was even worse – at one in five. MessageLabs found that US spam levels have also increased dramatically, with one in every three e-mails currently classified as spam. 42% of spam emails contain viruses according to Messagelabs.

The FTC charged James R. Haddaway and five others with deceptive spamming.

Senator Elizabeth Dole sued by Ken Pugh for spamming him during her campaign for office.

December 2002
Habeas launches whitelist, invoking trademarked haiku

AOL announces win of $7,000,000 in anti-spam suit against Jay Nelson / CN Productions. The case started in 1998, and was won October 25, 2002.

A Look Inside the European Response to Spam

by J.D. Falk

Last week the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), which assists the European Commission and its member states with network and information security issues, published its third Anti-Spam Measures Survey. The survey provides insight into how network operators in Europe are responding to the continued onslaught of email spam.

Nearly all respondents consider spam to be a significant part of their security operation, primarily because it reduces the quality of their service for their customers. This makes spam prevention effectiveness a key selling point, and a competitive advantage. It also impacts customer service operations, and adds to infrastructure management and costs. A quarter stated that their anti-spam budgets exceed €10,000 yearly; one reported theirs at €50,000. This does not include customer service, and I'd suspect it doesn't include personnel.

The majority provide "clear contact details for reporting e-mail abuse", and these complaints are the most common method for detecting spam. The next most common are to monitor for peaks in traffic, traffic anomalies, and spam signatures. Nearly 40% use spam traps. All of these methods are more common with the larger providers.

Everyone provides inbound spam filtering of some type. The most common is the use of blacklists, followed closely by content filtering. Blacklisting of URLs is more common than I'd expected, while reputation systems are far less common than I'd expected. The larger the provider, the more likely they are to use a reputation system and a whitelist.

Those who do use reputation systems are more likely to use their own internal database, followed closely by free reputation systems. Commercial reputation systems are a distant third. Because the report didn't list specific reputation system operators, it's unclear whether they'd consider something like Sender Score to be free or commercial.

Sender authentication is in third place for detecting spam, though the most common forms of authentication are SMTP AUTH and SMTP TLS. AUTH is only useful in preventing outbound spam (by ensuring that users attempting to send email are authorized to do so), while TLS doesn't provide a trust identifier in the same way as DKIM or SPF, so I'm not sure how to interpret this. I suspect the ENISA researchers may be conflating some unrelated concepts.

DKIM usage has increased from about 5% to 17% since 2007, and SenderID from 5% to 9%. SPF dropped a bit in usage, though still close to 40%. It is not clear from the report what the respondents actually do with the results of checking DKIM, SenderID, or SPF.

More than 60% of SMTP connection attempts are aborted due to blacklists; after factoring in invalid addresses and greylisting, fewer than 20% of connections are accepted. After accepting the connection, nearly 80% of messages are filtered out as spam. In total, 95.6% of messages are blocked or filtered. This is very similar to the MAAWG metrics.

Surprisingly, fewer than 80% forbid their users from spamming in their terms & conditions, or otherwise inform them of the legal risk of spamming. More than half rely on technical methods including blacklisting users from sending mail, limiting outbound mail volume, virus scanning, and blocking or otherwise managing port 25.

Even more surprising is the finding that 89% of respondents still process abuse reports manually -- an increase from 73% in 2007! Only 16% offer feedback loops to other organizations. 8% -- all large or very large providers -- use ARF. Looks like we have some work to do.

Another difference from North America, and particularly the United States, is the concern that there's an inherent conflict between filtering spam and protecting privacy. The report reminds us that the European Commission's Article 29 Data Protection Working Party determined in 2006 "that spam-filtering can be justified under the EU's legal framework", and recommends greater publicity of these findings. Even so, it's likely that the privacy framework in Europe removes some options, such as complaint feedback loops to senders, which are already common in the United States.

The ENISA report also makes some important recommendations, centering on increased collaboration between providers and reporting spam sources to law enforcement authorities. Email marketing was not mentioned at all.

CAUCE applauds ENISA and its participants for collecting and interpreting this important, useful data, and we sincerely hope things improve before the next report in 2011.

This Decade in Spam: 2001

2001 was a year fraught with legal wrangling in Washington State, Arizona, the U.S. congress, and the EU, false positives, ORBS operator Alan Brown being sued and threatened with arrest, and a spate of new email viruses.

January 2001

AOL filed suit versus Cyber Entertainment Networks, John Bennett and Joseph Elkind. The suit is aimed at holding website owners responsible for the actions of affiliates.

The Media3 Restraining Order against MAPS lapsed.

eBay changed user preferences from opt-out to opt-in. eBay eventually backs off. UPDATE: Some users have yet to forgive eBay.

R113, the Wireless Telephone Spam Protection Act introduced to U.S. congress by Rep. Rush Holt

Jupiter Research predicts 'topic-based' bulk filters that will allow some bulk email recipients want into the inbox at Hotmail & Yahoo!'

False positives of legitimate organizations such as peacefire.org, hosted on ISP Media3, but blocked by Hotmail's use of MAPS RBL come under scrutiny.

1,000,000 British Internet users at ISP Pipex taken offline by spam.

February 2001

eBay blocks users from seeing one-another's email addresses in an attempt to limit spam

The Anna Kournikova virus hits e-mail servers

"Spam costs users 10 Billion Euros per year" - European Commission

Telewest Blueyonder temporarily blacklisted by Hotmail, Yahoo

March 2001

Verizon Online Services, Inc. files lawsuit against Alan Ralsky. Ralsky did not learn from the experience, and is currently in prison, for spamming.

Genuity / CenterGate Research Group / UltraDNS founder Rodney Joffe threatens class-action suit against Phoenix-based mortgage company Acacai for mobile phone spam

The DMA gains support from the Bank of America, the financial and retail industry associations and key members of congress in their opposition to HR718 prior to a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. The bill passes unsullied, but is referred to the House judiciary committee.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission files charges against five spammers including PinkMonkey.com for pump & dump spam runs. The company quickly settles, promising not to do it again.

Ohio considers a state anti-spam law

Verio blocks EFF founder John Gilmore's infamous toad.com open relay. Gilmore claims it infringes his right to free speech. Verio claims the block infringes on his right to free spam, and leaves it in place.

April 2001
AOL blocks Earthlink mail. Eventually, they kiss and make up, and sue spammers together.

"The average U.S. senator can expect as many as 55,000 e-mails a month, mostly "spam"" - Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn

HR1071 the Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 tabled by Rep. Bob Goodlatte

Spam costs Brazilian Internet users $42,500,000 USD per month

JCPenney named 'worst corporate spammer' as the company ignores unsubscribe requests.

The FTC comes out in support of S630 - Senator Burns' anti-spam bill

May 2001
MAPS blocks an AT&T IP Range assigned to BeaverHome, sub-leased to spammers MonsterHut

The Sadmind worm spreads

U.S. Bill HR718 is deemed so watered down by a House judiciary committee as to be unsupportable by CAUCE. HR 1017 and S 630 are also deemed 'heavy handed' despite being opt-out, by the DMA. They too are watered now, and never passed.

'MAPS claims in suit with Black Ice Software dismissed' - Black Ice Software. 'That is not correct' - MAPS

DNSBL ORBS / Alan Brown sued for defamation by registrar Domainz, threatened with arrest warrant. ORBS stands accused of listing those sites that would not allow probes for open relays as being actual open relays. Xtra, Wellington, New Zealand ISP Actrix and accounting firm KPMG secure an injunction requiring ORBS to remove them from the blacklist. ORBS and its associated ISP Manawatu close suddenly. Brown leaves New Zealand, reputedly at first for the U.K. and eventually Holland. His whereabouts remain unknown, and an arrest warrant remains open in New Zealand.

Paul Cummins reopens ORBS in the UK. "Alan Brown and I are in dispute, he is saying I'm not to use the name ORBS. I'm saying get stuffed." - Paul Cummins

June 2001
MAPS begins to requires subscription-only access their RBL and other DNSBL Services, halting updates to their free services.

The Washington state Supreme Court upholds the state's anti-spam law

Brightmail spots 880,000 unique spam runs in June 2001

Motorola has files spam suit against Paging America

Kelly Thompson of MAPS admits to having been referred to as an "Uppity Chick" by spammers, in print media. Kelly's last name is now Molloy, she is the Manager of Ironport's SpamCop, and happily, she is still uppity.

July 2001

Japanese telecom company NTT DoCoMo spends $217,000,000 USD to block mobile spam

The Sircam worm is released. It makes a media splash. The Code Red worm is released

British MEP (and former east-enders star) Michael Cashman sucessfully scraps opt-in as a pernmission regime in the EU.

August 2001

MAPS pulls Harris Interactive IPs from the Realtime Blackhole List DNSBL

Code Red II begins aggressively spreading onto Microsoft systems, primarily in China.

DMA admits e-MPS is a failure with only 75,000 addresses registered for the service.

The Nimda worm is released, exploiting vulns left by Code Red and Sadmind. Viruses become the new spam-=sending platform, far outpacing open relays, most of which are closed, or blocked by DNSBLs.

'8% of all email spam' declares Brightmail

September 2001
The EU Parliament rejects spam laws, deciding to let individual member countries to determine their own anti-spam laws

September 13, 2001 - Spammers hit an all-time low. The first spams exploiting terrorist attacks of 9/11 are spotted, conning donations to fake victim-support charities.

October 2001

The Klez worm is first identified

Verizon settles lawsuit against mortgage spammer Acacia. Rodney Joffe's suit continues.

The Washington State law upheld as constitutional, the case against Jason Heckel proceeds.

November 2001

26% of all spam spotted by Trend Micro deemed 'non-English'.

December 2001

Peacefire.org's Bennett Haselton wins in Washington State small claims court against spammers.

December 24: The DMA's Bob Wietzen infamously suggests that if people were merely emailed $1 coupon for Tide, they would like spam. Ho, ho, ho. Consumers disagree. Vehemently.

This Decade in Spam: 2000

Today, we open our look back at the past decade in spam with the year 2000. 

Y2K is possibly best described as the year the Mail Abuse Protection System got sued. A lot. MAPS, as many will remember, was the preeminent anti-spam blacklist at the time, in use by many major receiving sites, and they took some controversial steps to block some major email senders of the day, who in turn, launched lawsuits to prevent that from happening.

As well, some state and federal laws came up for consideration or were struck down in the United States, Hotmail deployed a 'This is Spam' button, and Ferris Research made a fearless prediction.

January 2000

DMA launches e-MPS - a 'do not spam' list of email addresses. CAUCE and other anti-spam groups decry the service as useless window dressing intended to placate legislators with ostensible industry self-regulation and stave off legislation. In case anyone is keeping score, CAUCE was right, the D.M.A. very wrong.

February 2000

St. Kitts & Nevis diplomat Jonathan Randall Curshen arrested and charged by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with spam-based pump & dump stock manipulation.

The cases were eventually tried in 2003 and 2006, and settled in 03/2009.

James Sheret Jr. and Glenn Conley charged by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with spam-based pump & dump stock manipulation with phony "AOL Investment Snapshot" branding.

March 2000

Federal bill HR 3113 Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act of 2000 introduced to congress with companion bill S. 2542 Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2000. Neither passes into law.

Washington state anti-spam law ruled to be violating the U.S. constitution, the case against Jason Heckel (dba Natural Instincts) was dismissed; the decision was eventually reversed.

Hotmail deploys inbox spam filtering

A survey revealed that Internet users did not trust marketers to self-regulate against spam (not much has changed, since)

April 2000

China noted to be a worrisome new source of spam.

May 2000

The ILoveYou virus was launched, it eventually infected 10% of all computers on the 'net.

A Tidbits.com survey finds 7% of respondents receive more than 71 spam messages per week, 40 percent receive 10 or fewer spam messages in the same time period.

June 2000

Colorado bill HB 1309 "Colorado Junk Email Law" becomes state law.

The California state anti-spam law ruled is ruled unconstitutional in the Ferguson vs. Friendfinder suit.

Denmark passes a national anti-spam law.

July 2000

Harris Interactive files a law suit against AOL, HotMail, MSN, Qwest, and several other ISPs for blocking HI email, citing use of Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) Real-time Blacklist (RBL).

Yesmail files suit, gets a restraining order against their inclusion on the MAPS RBL.
August 2000

Yesmail & MAPS arrive at a mutual agreement, lawsuit withdrawn

Symantec invests $18 million in spam-filtering company Brightmail

September 2000

Harris Interactive settles law suit against AOL, HotMail, MSN, Qwest, et al.
October 2000

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sends letters to 1,000 spammers, warning their chain letter spam scheme was illegal and instructing them to stop promoting their chain letters, to return any money they had received by participating in the program, and to forward a copy of the FTC's warning letter to everyone they had spammed.

November 2000

Newly formed anti-spam organization Spamhaus exposes AT&T Pink Contract with Nevada Hosting. Nevada subsequently refused service.

24/7 Media sues MAPS, wins Temporary Restraining Order, preventing blacklisting of their IPs.

December 2000

Media3 Sues MAPS for RBL Listing

Register.com wins a lawsuit against Verio over Verio's spamming of email contacts in WHOIS records.

Verizon was taken offline briefly by spam.

Ferris Research predicts in Businessweek:

"It's only going to get worse; Within the next five years, 40% of your incoming e-mail is going to be spam, up from 10% today."