Portrait of a Spammer

[tw]

from NY Times of 28 Apr 2003
E-Mail Service Providers Unite in Bid to Stop Spam
The three leading providers of e-mail accounts said yesterday that they had started to work together to develop ways to reduce the unwanted commercial messages, commonly known as spam, that are increasingly clogging their customers' mailboxes.
The companies America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo are calling for technical changes in the way e-mail is passed around cyberspace to make it easier to determine who really sent it and what it is about.
Each company has developed its own technologies to identify and discard spam, and they boast of these in their advertising. But even though these systems sidetrack several billion pieces a day, they miss so much more that spam has become a leading source of complaints from users. Many studies show that the quantities of spam have at least doubled in the last year so the companies have agreed to cooperate with rivals.