A former AOL employee was sentenced today to 15 months in prison in New York for selling spammers all 92 million screen names from the AOL files.

I just wonder how much he sold them for. One dollar per name would be 92 million dollars. What a haul.

Source: Channel Oklahoma.com

What do you think about this? What senetnce would you have given him? Does this worry you, and why? (yes or no first on last question)

I think they said he sold them for just $28,000. He sold them to a company starting an online casino, but he also knew they may end up in other spammers hands. The judge is considering making him pay back around $80K, but AOL is trying to get at least $300K.

I think this gentleman just did not think clearly and fully before getting greedy. I guess the lure of a lump sum $28k was just too much for him to think about getting caught, and the consequences. I think the sentencing is just, because it was corporate theft. What if all 30million people left AOL because of the spam (they said about 30million accounts were stolen, most of the accounts had multiple screen names = 92million) So I definatly think it's a fair sentence. I'd make the guy come back though and work in Member Retention, dealing with users who want to cancel because of the spam problem, until he payed off his fine. ($5.35/hr). (oh yeah with no internet access at his cube, just a phone)

Doesn't really worry me. Once people get a decent spam filter installed on their pc. Spam's no longer an issue. It's like getting junk mail in the mail box. (it's all about having a trash can close by.)

A fair sentence would be one year for every account to run concurrently. If this guy thinks $28,000 is enough to risk prison, then the guy is an idiot. He should have gotten one dollar per account for a total of 92 million. THAT would be worth the risk of a couple of years in the joint.

What do you think a good spam filter would be? We have a new system at work and the spam is horrible!

If you use Microsoft Outlook the best I've found is Spam Bayes.
http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/windows.html

It learns from you what emails are spam and which are junk. After a few days of training it's be far in my opinion the best available. I've ran this software on corporate pc's where they were getting 50 or more spam messages a day, and it filtered down to zero spam within a week.

WARNING! it's not the most user friendly application, requires a couple mins of reading. After that you're good to go.

What Mail client do you use?

Thanks so much, I'll forward this to my companies tech people... we just changed email for the third time - maybe this will help!

We get around 15,000 spams a day.

We installed a Barracuda hardware spam filter, which catches 14,975 of them.

Price: A little over a thousand. Time saved per day: priceless.

If only everyone could get a barracuda hardware spam filter :)
I'm love to put that between my users pc, and their cable modem :).