OptinRealBig Bites the Big One

One of the worst spam operations has just filed for bankruptcy. Scott Richter's spam email sending company - OptinRealBig has filed for chapter 11. OptinRealBig was at one point such a prolific spammer, SpamButcher's spambuster was specifically trained to identify and eliminate email originating from them. Most filter entries operate only on the message's content.

Many other spam utilities target them by use of DNS blacklists. Blacklists are lists of known spam sources. Sometimes they only target specific servers. Often they can be used to ban entire networks known to be heavily used by spammers.

Richter faces both a $500,000 fee from the NY attorney general, and possibly several million in legal fines from a lawsuit involving Microsoft. Microsoft has increasingly gone of abusers of its Hotmail mail services in court. At worst, Richter could get hit for as much as $40 million.

One major anti-spam watchdog group claims that Richter is the third biggest spammer in the world. Many of his emails violated certain aspects on the CAN-SPAM act by using misleading subject lines or falsified senders. Microsoft has also recently augmented it's Outlook spam control by allows users to block images.

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