] A blow-by-blow account of how one of the world's most
] prolific senders of spam email was tracked down and
] prosecuted had an audience of spam fighters on the edge
] of their seats last week.

New Scientist Breaking News - Project Honeypot aims to trap spammers

] A year after a sweeping federal antispam law went into
] effect, there is more junk e-mail on the Internet than
] ever, and Levon Gillespie, according to Microsoft, is one
] reason.

The New York Times Technology Law Barring Junk E-Mail Allows a Flood Instead

AOL Postmaster on stopping spam

How to Stop Spam

So, I've been working on this project since I started at Ironport in November. I meant to post this article yesterday before Slashdot got to it - but I failed. Sorry about that.

The slashdot article really butchered the story and it's interesting to see all of the conspiracy theories around this partnership.

Ironport's Bonded Sender teams up with Hotmail

] Global Removal provides a program to mass-emailers that
] will read a text delimited database of email addresses,
] remove all of our customer's email addresses from that
] list and produce a new file containing a cleaned list for
] them to use. We are able to accomplish this without
] them ever receiving an unencrypted list of our customer's
] email addresses. Our CleanList program is
] ported to both Windows and Linux so that it will run on
] either system.

Protection Money?

Global Removal - Paying spammers not to spam you.

] MANCHESTER, New Hampshire -- A security flaw at a website
] operated by the purveyors of penis-enlargement pills has
] provided the world with a depressing answer to the
] question: Who in their right mind would buy something
] from a spammer?

Wired News: Swollen Orders Show Spam's Allure

] The canned-meat company filed two legal challenges with
] the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to try to stop
] SpamArrest from using the decades-old name Spam, for
] which it holds the trademark.

Yahoo! News - Hormel Fights to Defend Spam Name

I think this is a very interesting article on Spam, because it addresses the issues about how much Spam actually costs companies. I'm not doubting that Spam costs companies quite a bit of money, but I've always thought that the statements of just how much it costs them were over inflated. This seems to be a practical article addressing both sides of the coin, and the first to honestly assess what it costs to the Spammer to send email.

So many articles make allegations that it costs next to nothing for Spammers to send Spam, and they are quite wrong. There are different tiers of Spammers and different cost brackets for each. You can't lump them all into the same category. Some spammers spend _millions_ on delivery of their email. Some use dial-up connections and actually don't last very long.. nor do they make very much money.

Diverging Estimates of the Costs of Spam