Email

Overheard: Even spammers have to pay taxes

“I built my entire life around a facade. I’m very embarrassed and I’m ashamed.” Robert Soloway, as quoted in Spammer sentenced to 47 months in prison

The Zombie “Spam King” is going to jail for four years and has to pay over $700,000 in restitution.  It wasn’t the CAN-SPAM act that got him. Like Al Capone before him, Soloway was busted for failing to pay taxes. Soloway, who already had a $7 million judgement against him from Microsoft and a $10 million judgement against him from an ISP in Oklahoma,  pleaded guilty to mail fraud, fraud in electronic mail and failure to file a tax return. 

Ironically, the spam this guy sent out was all about how to send spam. His company’s name? Newport Internet Marketing. For $495, Soloway’s customers could have an ad sent to 20,000,000 e-mail addresses. He also sold $150 software for sending out unsolicited bulk email.

Overheard: PGP is just an envelope

Perhaps you think your E-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don’t you always send your paper mail on postcards? Phil Zimmerman, Why do you need PGP?

Phil Zimmerman is an interesting guy. You may remember that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California tried to put him in jail for making his email encryption program, Pretty Good Privacy, public. It was a crazy story.

So what’s he up to now? VoIP security.

Overheard: Let’s all declare email bankruptcy and start over January 1

Did you ever wish you could delete all your email without responding? Maybe you can. It’s called email bankruptcy. You realize you are never going to dig yourself out from under the pile of email in your inbox so you just declare that you won’t. You start afresh. Anne Zelenka, Before You Declare Email Bankruptcy…

I got another notification this morning that my mailbox is over its limit. Geesh. One of the best Facebook wall posts I read this year was from a developer at Microsoft who said that his mailbox is so out of control that he just periodically wipes everything out and just starts again — and if I wanted directions for how to do that, to email him.