Microsoft joins peers in major anti-spam suits Microsoft Corp. of Redmond -- along with rival e-mail providers EarthLink Inc., America Online Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. -- jointly announced they have filed the first major industry lawsuits under the new federal anti-spam law. The group has combined their anti-spam efforts under the new law, as opposed to the past practice of going after spammers on their own, the group said. The law, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003, went into effect Jan. 1. The companies filed six lawsuits against hundreds of defendants, including some of the nation's most notorious large-scale spammers. The lawsuits were announced by senior executives of the companies at a joint press conference at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, D.C. Each of the four companies last night filed legal complaints in federal courts in California, Georgia, Virginia and Washington state, they said. The complaints charge the defendants with sending a combined total of hundreds of millions of bulk spam e-mail messages to customers of the four networks. Some of the common allegations include deceptive solicitations for a variety of products including get-rich-quick schemes, prescription drugs, pornography, instructions for conducting spam campaigns, banned CDs, mortgage loans, university diplomas, cable descramblers and other common types of unsolicited e-mail.
