Back in the day, a spammer who found himself on the wrong side of an e-mail block list publicly asserted in all seriousness that anti-spam activities are funded in secret by a shadowy cartel of lumber producers who were seeing their margins from paper production erode as marketers made the shift from postal junk mail to e-mail. It became a sort of running joke in the usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email. One of the straw arguments frequently mounted by spammers to justify their business model was the environmental friendliness of e-mail. We now have a credible estimate of the carbon foot print of e-mail: about 135kg per user, annually – or the equivalent of a 200-mile drive in a car. Turns out e-mail isn’t all that green.

Facebook this week announced three more spam-related lawsuits, and among the defendants they’ve named is a guy named Steven Richter. A bunch of blogs and media outlets assumed this is the same Steve Richter, who is the father of spammer Scott Richter and president of his son’s company Media Breakaway, LLC. The company was quick to respond with a press release, pointing out that the named defendant is actually a different Steve Richter.

ISPs who use SORBS blocklist data for e-mail filtering woke up one morning two weeks ago to discover that they were unintentionally blocking mail from great swathes of the Intarwebs, including Yahoo!, Apple, and Google Groups. SORBS operator Michelle Sullivan at first claimed they were the target of a massive DDOS attack, but later disclosed that they had inadvertently placed a bunch of historical block list entries in their current listings database during a server migration. Oy.

Just in time for Halloween, notorious spammer (and unintentional comedian) Bill Waggoner has risen from the grave with the launch of yourinternetbodyguard.com (you may want to mute audio before you click through). His new site solicits contributions to be used (somehow) against Steve Linford of Spamhaus and SpamCop founder Julian Haight (never mind that Haight hasn’t had a thing to do with SpamCop for years).