Today is my periodic Fred Wilson blog love fest. Fred’s characterization of the Internet Axis of Evil, which currently consists of Phishing, Click Fraud, DNS Hacking, Comment Spam/Link Spam, Adware/Spyware, Spam, and Viruses is awesome. In sympathy with Fred and in an effort to help reign down terror on these evil fuckers, I’ve created a new category in my blog called Internet Axis of Evil.
As I a went through my daily early morning ritual of feeding the dogs, drinking some tea, reading various papers on line, and deleting trackback spam (who really responds to “poor credit loans” and “military cash loans”) I came across an article in the Denver Post on Scott Richter, the CEO of the spam firm OptInRealBig.com. Scott’s making a ton of money spamming people ($19.6m in revenue in 2004; Scott took down $1.2m last year), but the company filed for bankruptcy to help protect itself against a variety of law suits, including one from Microsoft / Hotmail. C’mon guys, the company is “absolutely profitable” (Scott’s dad and lawyer Steven’s words), but y’all go bankrupt to protect against lawsuits – could it be that you are actually concerned that the lawsuits are legit?
Fortunately, there are plenty of good guys fighting the bad guys. Today, the Email Service Provider Coalition added a number of members, including our company Return Path. ESPC also expanded their steering committee to including Return Path. ESPC exists because the folks involve “recognize the need for strong technological anti-spam solutions that ensure the delivery of legitimate email.”
While I’m sure this post will generate lots of comment spam, I’m trilled (shit, someone’s going to throw something at me today) that there are plenty of good guys in the world fighting the Internet Axis of Evil.