Hotmail's Other Spam Problem
The 'Microsoft Personal Addresses' issue covered in HotmailSpamProblem is not Hotmail's only problem with spam.
Real Hotmail email addresses are a not insignificant source of various forms of advance fee fraud spam. Much of it comes from SBL and XBL listed IP addresses, sufficiently many that we've had to do Hotmail's filtering job for it as discussed back in WebmailBadSources.
In this day and age, letting IP addresses like 80.179.107.229 (listed since January 2005 as SBL15568) or 212.52.145.234 (SBL22101, December 2004) send email out through one's services counts as at least significant disregard for other people on the Internet. Hotmail is serving as an enabler to these people's spamming; it should not be.
Shame on you, Hotmail and Microsoft. I expected better from a company that claims to be as firmly anti-spam as Microsoft has been in the past. Filing big lawsuits is nice, but you need to do other things too.
Hotmail and other webmail providers are 'attractive nuisances' for spammers, much like accessible swimming pools are for kids. It is time (and long past the time) that Hotmail and others put up the antispam equivalent of fences.
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