Want up to 20% of the civil judgements against spammers? Well, that’s one thing the FTC has to consider as part of CAN-SPAM. Spamhaus and the Direct Marketing Association think this is an awful idea. Apparently some Senators disagreed.

What an interesting development. It turns out that the Chicago company which is launching its own national Do-Not-Email list likes the technology we have as an enhancement of their offering and vice-versa. The short update is this: we think Ethical Email is on to something and they feel the same way about us. We’re going to be working closely together on a number of ideas.

Their service to get off large email house’s lists. Our software to eliminate all the rest of the spam. Sounds like a great plan, doesn’t it? We thought so too.

The source of the information in this article is not breaking news, but the stats are worth reviewing again, if you’ve never read the Pew Internet & American Life reports.

Some examples:

* About 63 percent of younger users (aged 18-29) say spam is a real problem, compared with 73 percent of older users (aged 30 and up).

* Sixty percent of women say spam makes it hard to access personal e-mail, compared with 51 percent of men. Sixty-three percent of women say obscene spam bothers them most, compared with 42 percent of men.

* About 81 percent of parents complain about naughty spam, compared with 72 percent of non-parents. One Internet security software company reports that 80 percent of children using e-mail are sent inappropriate spam each day.

Where do you fall into this?

Someone working for AOL got their hands on the master subscriber list - 92 million addresses, registered by 32 million people worldwide - and spammed them, sold the list, and spammed them again. The men involved are known and charged. No word on if the list has been isolated or contained in any way. My guess is no. That it’s been passed on since and AOL customers are not done getting spam yet.

Complain you got spam from a Hotmail user, and Hotmail’s abuse team will shut down their account, no questions asked. Might make for a really evil practical joke, but unlucky Hotmail users aren’t laughing.

Here’s the story.

Well, they’re (AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Earthlink) releasing they’re ideas on how to fight spam by offering suggestions on how to stop domain-spoofing (faking who you are in an email) and what I call Zombie PCs (spammers taking over your computer to send spam). It won’t mean a lot to us regular users for a while, but it will help all of us in the long run do a better job of fighting spam.

You can see his website and sign up for his list, but what’s unclear is how he hopes to keep the list out of the hands of lawbreaking spammers. He’s got a national radio campaign going and his list already tops 100,000 people. Personally, without a detailed explanation of how email addresses are to be protected and defended against the worst spammers (the ones who use unsubscribe requests to send more spam), I feel that this sounds both noble and tremendously risky.

We’re attempting to contact them to discuss this idea further. I’ll keep you posted.

Even though some lawyer says CAN-SPAM has only been moderately successful, I’d say this article makes a pretty good case for lawbreaking being a pretty bad idea in the world of spam.

IBM is coming out with an anti-spam device they made with the help of MessageLabs. The article is strangely critical in closing, though, saying that the device may frustrate a lot of employees and get high false positives - apparently using any kind of profanity in an email will get it filtered.

Makes you wonder if that kind of filtering technology is the way to go…

In this well-written article, we learn that Scott Richter won’t be making his Spam King clothing line after all… well at least not with the name Spam King. Hormel jumped all over it since it uses the name ’spam’ in a commerical sense.

Aww darn. You mean I’m not going to be able to buy the panties that say “Just Opt Out” on them? What a shame.