Smashing the spammers

From the Economist here’s “Opening Pandora’s inbox”

For overweight lovers of pornography in need of a cheap loan or a “boost”, the offers of slimming pills, Viagra, smut and the like that flood into e-mail inboxes around the world are a positive boon. For most consumers and businesses, however, “spam” has grown over the past few years from a mere nuisance into a costly and time-consuming threat. On Tuesday August 9th, business fought back. Microsoft’s case against Scott Richter ended in victory for the software giant after the “spam king” agreed to pay $7m to settle charges relating to a lawsuit filed in 2003 against his internet firm, OptInRealBig.

One study estimated that spam costs American businesses $17 billion a year in lost productivity and anti-spam defenses. Richter makes Dennis Kozlowski look like a piker.