TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Battle Against Spam Shifts to Containment


Battle Against Spam Shifts to Containment


Monty Solomon (monty@roscom.com)
Fri, 15 Apr 2005 21:41:57 -0400

By ANICK JESDANUN AP Internet Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- There's a new strategy in the spam battle: Call it
containment. Filters for blocking junk e-mail from inboxes have
improved to the point that doing much more will needlessly kill
legitimate e-mail, said Carl Hutzler, America Online Inc.'s anti-spam
coordinator. So e-mail gatekeepers are shifting gears.

Now they're getting more aggressive at keeping spam from leaving
their systems in the first place.

EarthLink Inc., for instance, is phasing in a requirement that
customers' mail programs submit passwords before it will send out
their e-mail.

Like most Internet providers, EarthLink previously made sure only
that a computer was associated with a legitimate account. Now that
viruses can co-opt computers and use them to send spam, that's no
longer secure enough.

So Earthlink sent out new software, made automated tools available for
download and walked customers through manually changing their mail
settings when they called tech support for other reasons. A year into
the initiative, EarthLink has 80 percent of its customers converted.

- http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=48398343

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