Whose Side Is Microsoft On?
from the go-get-'em dept
Yesterday Microsoft made lots of news by filing lawsuits against 15 spammers. However, the San Jose Mercury News is taking them (and AOL and Yahoo and others) to task for saying they’re anti-spam while doing other things to encourage spam. Specifically, they complain that Microsoft (and many others) are supporting legislation that would legalize spam in many forms, so that they can spam their own users (or sell their names). It appears that many of these companies are against spam only as far as their own corporate marketing departments. Companies that were truly against spam would realize that any spam is a nuisance to their customers, and would do anything to support their right to be left alone.
Comments on “Whose Side Is Microsoft On?”
Get real, MS's too easy of a target...
While it seems everyone loves to hate Microsoft these days, they have a point here. I admittedly subscribe to several of their online newsletters, which come as email each month – hardly “spam”. The crap they’re fighting against is the multiple body-part enlargement missives that invade our mailboxes each day through ABUSE – not permission marketing.
If you find you don’t want one of Microsoft’s newsletters or offers polluting your inbox anymore, you can easily opt out, and they *honor* that request (I know, I’ve gone through it). Try saying the same for those sh*theads who send out barnyard sex, credit card offers and all the rest of the crap, sometimes to randomly attempted addresses.
I wish Microsoft luck – and if I were a spammer, I’d be worried – MS has plenty of cash to pay for better lawyers than spammers can afford, that’s for certain.
Debra Bowen and Microsoft(?!)
From the Mercury News article:
“The California bill that Microsoft opposes, a total ban on spam written by Sen. Debra Bowen, is a critical test of how far legislators are willing to go to battle the spam scourge. Armed with a stack of amendments, Microsoft caused a vote on the bill to be postponed by two weeks.”
I for one am sick of getting spam from Sen Bowen–she must have an in with Microsoft for them to go to these lengths.