hotmail

[Tom]

In case anyone ever doubted that banning hotmail from the game was the right thing to do:

I just had the displeasure of having to manually clean out two dozen spam accounts from the Might & Fealty forums. All of them, with no exception, were using hotmail accounts.

It's a spam-pit, and if you are using hotmail than I personally think you are a fool who supports a spam operation. Hotmail has been a spam hotbed for at least a decade and they've not bothered to clean up their act. Ever. They just don't care, thus they are supporting spam, thus if you use them, you are supporting spam.

[Buffalkill]

Not doubting you, but I'm surprised I've never heard of this before. Do other sites ban hotmail users too?

[Shizzle]

Please elaborate why hotmail users support spam?

[Wolfang]

Pretty much 100% of the people I know has a hotmail account...

[De-Legro]

Not doubting you, but I'm surprised I've never heard of this before. Do other sites ban hotmail users too?

I've played web games that ban Hotmail and/or yahoo accounts. It seems to me it was much more common several years ago though.

[Buffalkill]

Shizzle: Your Rick Astley link doesn't work anymore.

[Anaris]

Please elaborate why hotmail users support spam?

I think the thought process goes something like this:

• Tom has seen a great deal of spam come from Hotmail addresses over the years.
• In Tom's mind, spam is one of the biggest, most important problems in the world today.
• Because Hotmail is still one of the hosts of choice for free email addresses for spammers, this necessarily means that Microsoft makes no real effort to stop them (because of #2), and thus this means that they must approve of this activity.
• Furthermore, anyone else who uses Hotmail must also approve of this activity, because if they were right-thinking people, they would obviously boycott such a purveyor of evil.

I think the important point there to keep in mind is #2. As far as Tom is concerned, spamming should be a capital offense. When one is that focused on a particular type of offense, it becomes easy to believe that not only should everyone else share your view, but that everyone who is not actively working against that offense is a supporter of it who needs to be punished.

[Tom]

Spam is a million-cuts offense. Nobody thinks it's big, because nobody gets killed or robbed. If someone steals $50,000 we all agree he should go to jail. Spam isn't a victim-less crime, it costs something. Time, effort and resources. It's hard to measure exactly, but let's say for arguments sake that a spam e-mail costs 1% of one cent. I know the spam that flooded the M&F forum today cost a lot more than that, because it took about an hour of my time to clean everything out. But let's assume an average.

Your typical spammer sends several million spam mails every day. That's a couple hundred $ in damage - PER DAY. He's doing the $50k heist twice a year. And that's your typical spammer, large operations are tens of times that size.

And Tim, if you think I'm wrong or over-zealous, how about I disable all the anti-spam stuff that this forum runs just for one week and let you clean things up? Just so you know, they have prevented 143,921 spam bot sign-ups since we installed them. That's not world-wide, that is THIS FORUM ONLY. The typical spam bot makes 3-5 postings before he moves on (they know more will trigger deeper spam defenses), so that's about half a million postings prevented by people who agree with me and sat down to write anti-spam software. Which costs time and money.


So yes, everyone who supports spam in even the slightest way is aiding and abetting a criminal.


Why do I count hotmail on that list? Because while other services have their share of spam accounts registered, hotmail stands in a league of its own. They have never, ever, given a !@#$, even before MS bought them. They were listed on rfc-ignorant.org for most of their existence and have consistently ignored messages to both postmaster@hotmail.com and abuse@hotmail.com - two addresses that the "laws of the Internet" REQUIRE you to have for all your domains. Their backend-behaviour is outright hostile, they apparently save costs by pushing the entire burden of e-mail on other servers as far as technically possible with bull!@#$ bounces and delays, aggressive delivery and reluctant reception. They do to e-mail what AOL used to do to Usenet, except that Usenet had at least some organisation and could fight back (and AOL did get awfully close to a UDP).


Quite honestly, I don't think anyone who isn't at the front of this war that we system administrators, server software authors and security professionals fight for you users every day, every year, for over a decade now with no end in sight, should even speak up. There was a proposal a year or two ago that all the server admins of the world should band together and turn of any and all anti-spam tools for just one day. The idea was that if all the law-makers and regular people would actually GET the massive flood of spam that floods the Internet every day, they would finally understand that there really is a problem. The main counter-argument was that doing so would destroy e-mail once and for all.

Don't believe me? Think I'm exaggerting? Numbers: The lemuria.org mailserver has filtered out almost 15,000 spam messages during the past month. That's 500 spam messages every day. Tell me, how long would you bother with e-mail if your inbox would be flooded with a few hundred spam messages EVERY DAY?

If you don't think spam is a massive, out-of-control problem, that's because you live behind the walls that people like me hold for you. It's ignorant to an unbelievable degree. It's like saying that since we're all pretty healthy, all those doctors and hospitals aren't necessary anymore. You are healthy BECAUSE they exist and make it so. And the only reason you think spam is not an Internet-threatening problem is because thousands of people work tirelessly every day writing and maintaining anti-spam software, updating blacklists, cleaning up the mess, figuring out new ways to stop new kinds of spam and keeping the flood at bay.


end rant.

[Penchant]

Spam is a million-cuts offense. Nobody thinks it's big, because nobody gets killed or robbed. If someone steals $50,000 we all agree he should go to jail. Spam isn't a victim-less crime, it costs something. Time, effort and resources. It's hard to measure exactly, but let's say for arguments sake that a spam e-mail costs 1% of one cent. I know the spam that flooded the M&F forum today cost a lot more than that, because it took about an hour of my time to clean everything out. But let's assume an average.

Your typical spammer sends several million spam mails every day. That's a couple hundred $ in damage - PER DAY. He's doing the $50k heist twice a year. And that's your typical spammer, large operations are tens of times that size.

And Tim, if you think I'm wrong or over-zealous, how about I disable all the anti-spam stuff that this forum runs just for one week and let you clean things up? Just so you know, they have prevented 143,921 spam bot sign-ups since we installed them. That's not world-wide, that is THIS FORUM ONLY. The typical spam bot makes 3-5 postings before he moves on (they know more will trigger deeper spam defenses), so that's about half a million postings prevented by people who agree with me and sat down to write anti-spam software. Which costs time and money.


So yes, everyone who supports spam in even the slightest way is aiding and abetting a criminal.

[stuff]

Quite honestly, I don't think anyone who isn't at the front of this war that we system administrators, server software authors and security professionals fight for you users every day, every year, for over a decade now with no end in sight, should even speak up.

[stuff]

If you don't think spam is a massive, out-of-control problem, that's because you live behind the walls that people like me hold for you. It's ignorant to an unbelievable degree. It's like saying that since we're all pretty healthy, all those doctors and hospitals aren't necessary anymore. You are healthy BECAUSE they exist and make it so. And the only reason you think spam is not an Internet-threatening problem is because thousands of people work tirelessly every day writing and maintaining anti-spam software, updating blacklists, cleaning up the mess, figuring out new ways to stop new kinds of spam and keeping the flood at bay.


end rant.

Let's equate to spam to bacteria/disease. Spam is bad, I definitely agree with you on that but your suggestion is likes of banning meat because of the many food borne illnesses it can cause , or banning any metal that can rust because of tetanus. While if there was no other way around those issues, that might be a fair thing to do, but with things like cooking meat  properly and people getting shots, everyone would agree there is no need to ban meat or metal that can rust. The same logic applies here, banning hotmail, when you can and should install something like reCaptcha to prevent spam bots.

Some other things:
1.  I see nothing backing up that spam really costs that much. The hour of time is kinda your fault, since you chose to not use better anti-spam software. (I don't know much about spambots, but even I know that acceptable answers being on the page in regular text, ie not the squiggly stuff, are a bad idea.) If someone didn't gets shots that are common now, it's that person's fault they got sick if it was available to them. Why you don't just use reCaptcha or something similar like most sites, I don't know.

2.Saying anyone not on your side has no right to talk on the subject, is an obvious sign you are way too aggressive on the subject, aka, over zealous.

3. Not supporting doesn't equate to fighting it and not fighting it doesn't equate to supporting it.  Your current logic with the spam is anyone not fighting it is , ex. Hotmail not fighting spam more than others, and people not boycotting spam because of it, you see as supporting spam which is simply not true.

4. Disagreement on one thing does not equal disagreement on a separate issue, ie, disagreeing on banning hotmail doesn't equate to disagreeing on using anti-spam software.

[Tom]

The hour of time is kinda your fault, since you chose to not use better anti-spam software.

I'm done here. We're at the point in the argument where being raped is the girl's fault for wearing a skirt instead of a burka. At that point, there is simply nothing left worth discussing.

[De-Legro]

Some other things:
1.  I see nothing backing up that spam really costs that much. The hour of time is kinda your fault, since you chose to not use better anti-spam software. (I don't know much about spambots, but even I know that acceptable answers being on the page in regular text, ie not the squiggly stuff, are a bad idea.) If someone didn't gets shots that are common now, it's that person's fault they got sick if it was available to them. Why you don't just use reCaptcha or something similar like most sites, I don't know.

In general this discussion is kinda pointless. But did you ever think about the energy and bandwidth costs associated with spam? The earlier in the chain spam is detected and blocked, the less processing time and bandwidth systems down the line need to expend. Remember much as we are used to email being free, every email does have a cost associated with its creation and its path through the internet.

Also Captcha's aren't perfect. There is a constant "war" between people that code systems to catch scamers, and the programming behind spam bots that aim to circumvent it. So unless we want to set up the forums so that all posts must be approved by a moderator before they are shown, at least some spam is going to filter through.

In general Tom's argument is simple, until pressure is applied to Hotmail to fix their own problems, they are forcing systems down the chain to expend power,energy, processing time and people hours to attempt to reduce the amount of spam they produce. All email systems have problems with spam, the question is about them being proactive with the rest of the internet community in trying to reduce it. While I might no agree with Tom's stance, I do agree that while ever Hotmail is popular, they seem to have little incentive to change their business practise.

[Indirik]

Spam is theft. Spammers forge other people to pay the price for processing their garbage.

[Penchant]

I'm done here. We're at the point in the argument where being raped is the girl's fault for wearing a skirt instead of a burka. At that point, there is simply nothing left worth discussing.

My apologies for being overly aggressive, it's been a bad day for me so I haven't been in the greatest mood. I certainly don't agree with my prior statement of saying its kinda your fault. While with an illness it might be, it certainly is the spammers fault but I still suggest Captcha.

[Shizzle]

Shizzle: Your Rick Astley link doesn't work anymore.

:(

[egamma]

An an email admin myself, here are my thoughts.

1. Spam does cost money. My company spamhaus.org over $700 per year to use their spammer lists.
2. I don't have a hostmaster or abuse address, because when I did have them, all I received on them was spam. I plan to set up my own Spamikaze server soon, if I do, I may start monitoring abuse and hostmaster and sending the spam to my own blacklist.
3. If I blocked hotmail.com from sending my users email, I would probably be fired. They may have plenty of illegitimate users, but blocking legitimate users is not the way to stay in business.
4. Tom can do what he wants.