On Wednesday Robert Soloway was charged with fraud in connection with electronic mail, aggravated identity theft plus another 33 various charges. Soloway is the first person to be charged under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and if he is found guilty on all counts he will face a fine of a cool US$250,000 and a maximum prison term of 65 years - ouch! Prosecutors also want to seize US$773,000 from him, it is rumoured that this is how much Soloway has made from his firm, Newport Internet Marketing.

Unfortunately we’ve all been here before with over US$10 million in damages being awarded to Robert Braver, an ISP owner, by an Oklahoma court in 2005 and a Washington court ruling in favour of good old Microsoft back in the same year for the tidy sum of US$7 million. However neither of these rulings forced Soloway into a corner and he has remained one of Spamhaus’ most wanted spammers ever since.

In fact he appears to have had a pretty good time of it so far as, according to the prosecutor, he lives in a ‘ritzy apartment’ and drives a Mercedes convertible. Nice work if you can get it.

Here’s an interesting email from Soloway regarding the Braver ruling showing his arrogance. Spamhaus also has a nice list of bits and pieces they have compiled on Soloway over the years.

Hopefully this time, Soloway will get what he deserves and our inboxes will be a little leaner from now on.

Source: CNN

Featured Tags email, robert-soloway, spam


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Many of you have wondered how do those cool links work, those that launch your default mailing client with an email ready to be sent. Well so did I until some time now when I needed such a link for one of my projects. I do realize that you can find plenty information on this subject online but I wanted to put together an easy to use guide to create your own mailto() links.

Let’s start with the beginning: mailto() is used with the almighty <a> HTML tag like shown below. This is quite simple and if you add an anchor to it you get a simple link. This is useful for most purposes, but you can evolve:

<a href=”mailto:[email protected]”>

To use multiple recipients you can use something like this, and you can add as much recipients as you please separated by “,”.

<a href=”mailto:[email protected],[email protected]”>

Also if you wish to send a copy or a blind copy of the email to a certain address you can use the syntax below. After all the main recipients are added you must use “?” after that you just separate commands by “&”. Remember to use “?” just once after all the main recipients.

<a href=”mailto:[email protected][email protected]”>

Here is another example:

<a href=”mailto:[email protected][email protected][email protected]”>

Using the above commands you can create the basic structure for an email but there’s more. For example you can choose the title and put some text in the body of the email.

The following line creates an email to [email protected] with the title “Test subject”.

<a href=”mailto:[email protected]?subject=Test%20subject”>

Furthermore, you can add some standard text in the body:

<a href=”mailto:[email protected]?subject=Test%20subject&body=Test%20body”>

You might have noticed the “%20″ sign between words within the title or the body. That symbol is used by the HTML to mark an empty space. You don’t have to include it because the empty space will be transformed automatically. On the other hand if you want to mark a new line you have to use “%0A” like so:

<a href=”mailto:[email protected]?& body=A line%0A%0AAnother line%0A%0AThird line”>

Tips & Tricks:

A good suggestion is to encode your e-mail address in order to limit spam to the given email address, or maybe you want to encode the whole mailto() code. A good way to do this is to follow this link.

It’s good to know all the information above in order to understand the syntax of mailto() but in the end I strongly recommend that you use links like this to generate the code for you and then ecrypt it and use it.

Good luck and keep experimenting!

Example: Sample link

Featured Tags email, guide, how-to, mailto


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