UNESCO: spammers do not steal bases from mailers
In the framework of the UNESCO project "AntiSpam" a study was conducted of the public postal services of the Runet. From January to October 2006, a special working group checked whether Mail.ru, Yandex Mail, Rambler-Mail, Novaya Pochta and Pochta.ru were not sending address databases to spammers, whether spammers were stealing these databases, or if the administration itself was sending spam. services.
To this end, new mailboxes with names consisting of 14 letters and numbers were created. They took all possible precautions so that these addresses could not get into the spammers database, except as a result of malicious actions or negligence of the postal administration. The anti-spam filtering feature for incoming messages was disabled, and user agreements were checked for the absence of items that would give the administration the right to make advertising mailings to its users or transfer their addresses to third parties.
As a result, after nearly nine months of testing, only 2 letters arrived in the test boxes. Both were received from the administration of Mail.ru. The first one contained a greeting to the new user, the second contained a message about the release of the new version of the Mail.Ru Agent program, although when registering the test mailbox on Mail.ru, this program was not loaded and was not installed later.
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“In a certain sense, this message can be considered spam, since it was sent after the new version of the Federal Law“ On Advertising ”came into effect,” said Evgeny Altovsky, the coordinator of the Anti-Spam project. “The Mail.ru User Agreement contains clause 5.g, according to which,“ Mail.ru e-mails ... containing organizational and technical information about Mail.ru are not considered spam. ” However, what is considered spam and what is not - is regulated by law from July 2006, so paragraph 5.g is legally null and void because of its wording. Moreover, it is difficult to call a “organizational-technical” message about a software product, the user of which the recipient was not and is not ”.
However, the results of the study confirm the fact that in 2006, the 5 largest Russian public postal services did not transfer the database of addresses of their users to third parties and did not become victims of hackers.
To this end, new mailboxes with names consisting of 14 letters and numbers were created. They took all possible precautions so that these addresses could not get into the spammers database, except as a result of malicious actions or negligence of the postal administration. The anti-spam filtering feature for incoming messages was disabled, and user agreements were checked for the absence of items that would give the administration the right to make advertising mailings to its users or transfer their addresses to third parties.
As a result, after nearly nine months of testing, only 2 letters arrived in the test boxes. Both were received from the administration of Mail.ru. The first one contained a greeting to the new user, the second contained a message about the release of the new version of the Mail.Ru Agent program, although when registering the test mailbox on Mail.ru, this program was not loaded and was not installed later.
')
“In a certain sense, this message can be considered spam, since it was sent after the new version of the Federal Law“ On Advertising ”came into effect,” said Evgeny Altovsky, the coordinator of the Anti-Spam project. “The Mail.ru User Agreement contains clause 5.g, according to which,“ Mail.ru e-mails ... containing organizational and technical information about Mail.ru are not considered spam. ” However, what is considered spam and what is not - is regulated by law from July 2006, so paragraph 5.g is legally null and void because of its wording. Moreover, it is difficult to call a “organizational-technical” message about a software product, the user of which the recipient was not and is not ”.
However, the results of the study confirm the fact that in 2006, the 5 largest Russian public postal services did not transfer the database of addresses of their users to third parties and did not become victims of hackers.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/1886/
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