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dankos -> RE: Help! Disturbing Email Message (9/21/2005 14:35:16)
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Putting your own address in the "to" field is an old trick. See para 4:
Another spam scam I've been seeing regularly is from an organization that calls itself SPAMIS, which is supposed to stand for "Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam." I started getting these months ago, and found it pretty ironic that these claims that Microsoft sends unsolicited and unwanted e-mail were being sent as ... unsolicited and unwanted e-mail.
The more recent messages from SPAMIS have gone far afield of the "spam" claims against Microsoft, and started making other accusations. The latest one, which I got last Thursday, is titled "Microsoft plans to stop supporting the American economy by outsourcing more than 10,000 jobs over 10 years to China." When you dig deeper into this story, you find that the source of those numbers appears to be Kai-Fu Lee, the Microsoft executive who left to work for Google and is being sued by Microsoft for breaching the non-compete agreement that he had signed. Not exactly an unbiased source.
But whether or not the outsourcing numbers are true, it's highly unlikely that the company has any plans to "stop supporting the American economy." And if they did, what does that have to do with spam (which is supposedly SPAMIS's purpose for existing)? It has become very clear, if it wasn't already, that SPAMIS is not an anti-spam organization like CAUCE (the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email), but is in fact an anti-Microsoft organization that uses spam to further its campaign against the company.
To confirm even further that SPAMIS is a spammer, their most recent messages - like so many other spam messages - disguise who the message is from by placing the recipient's own e-mail address in the "from" field. Thus, when their messages show up in my mailbox, it looks as if they came from me. Gosh, why would a legitimate organization do that? Obviously lots of other folks are onto their scam and blocking mail from their own domain.
According to several sources on the Web, the driving force behind SPAMIS is none other than Robert Soloway, who is a well-known spammer and seller of mailing list addresses. According to Spamhaus, a popular register of known spam operations, rumor has it that Soloway has hired virus writers to create spam zombies. You can read more about Soloway here:
http://www.wxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=050920ED-Spam_Is
It comes as no surprise that Soloway was one of the spammers Microsoft sued for illegal spamming. He has recently mounted a campaign against Microsoft's Sender ID framework, a technology that's designed to stop spam by verifying the IP addresses of email senders and comparing them to the registered addresses for the purported sending domain to authenticate senders' identities - you can read more about Sender ID here:
http://www.wxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=050920ED-Sender_ID
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