Spam

Pornographic spam e-mail must be labeled as such starting May 19, or senders will face fines, the Federal Trade Commission said in adopting rules to implement an anti-spam law passed in December. Such unsolicited commercial e-mail must start the subject line with the term "sexually explicit" in capital letters and carry similar identification in the message body, according to the regulation posted on the FTC's website. The law, which took effect Jan.

Federal authorities said Thursday that they had arrested two e-mail marketers and were searching for two others in the government's first use of a new law designed to crack down on "spam" e-mail. A raid was conducted on a Detroit-area operation accused of sending out millions of e-mail advertisements for a fraudulent weight-loss patch, the Federal Trade Commission said.

Microsoft Corp. has filed eight lawsuits against spammers, saying that they deceived consumers and used false information to hide their tracks, the world's largest software maker said. The lawsuits are the latest salvo in the Redmond, Wash.-based company's war to eradicate unsolicited e-mails, which have clogged countless inboxes on personal computers.

As I was threshing through my e-mail in-box the other day, searching for the 0.0024% of new messages that might carry information I needed to know, I cursed for the umpteenth time whatever person or process produced the one feature of the Internet most responsible for the scourge of spam: the convention by which e-mail is paid for by the recipient, not the sender. As familiar as the flu, spam afflicts everybody with an e-mail account, of course.

Spammed if we do, spammed if we don't. Following that reasoning, the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday rejected a plan to create a "do-not-e-mail" list modeled after the popular "do-not-call" registry that keeps telemarketers at bay. In a 5-0 vote, the FTC decided that the proposed list would entice spammers to send more junk e-mail, not less. Many e-mail marketers flout the federal and state anti-spam laws already on the books.

Welcome! You've got spam. An America Online employee accused of stealing at least 92 million e-mail addresses and selling them to a spammer for more than $100,000 was arrested Wednesday at his home in Harpers Ferry, W.Va. Jason Smathers, 24, was charged with violating federal computer fraud and anti-spam laws. AOL said after his arrest that it had fired the computer engineer. Smathers' alleged accomplice, 21-year-old e-mail marketer Sean Dunaway, was arrested in Las Vegas on the same charges.

U.S. law enforcement officials are arresting dozens of people in a nationwide crackdown on spam e-mail, identity theft and other fraudulent online activity, a person involved in the investigation said Wednesday. The sweep involves about 100 arrests, property seizures and other enforcement actions against people who spread computer viruses, trick people into divulging bank account numbers and send massive amounts of unsolicited commercial e-mail, the individual said.

Add America Online Inc. to the growing list of companies and organizations shunning a spam-fighting proposal from Microsoft Corp. AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc., cited "tepid support" for Microsoft's so-called Sender ID technology, which seeks to cut down on junk e-mail by making it difficult for spammers to forge e-mail headers and addresses, a common technique for hiding their origins.

A dispute over intellectual property claims from Microsoft Corp. has dealt a fatal blow to an ambitious effort by Internet engineers to create a technical standard for curbing junk e-mail. The failure to reach consensus on the Microsoft-championed proposal known as Sender ID throws back to the free market a process many consider urgent in view of the unrelenting onslaught of spam.

Time Warner Inc.'s America Online unit, Microsoft Corp., EarthLink Inc. and Yahoo Inc. -- the four largest U.S. Internet mail providers -- sued dozens of junk e-mail senders in a second wave of lawsuits under a new U.S. law designed to curb spam. The six lawsuits filed in California, Georgia and Washington target senders of unwanted commercial e-mail peddling pornography, prescription pills, cheap mortgages and other products, the companies said.