From Dan Gilmore, "Via Greg Aharonian's Internet Patent News Service comes the news that AT&T has received this patent for -- I kid you not -- a way to defeat anti-spam measures:

"A system and method for circumventing schemes that use duplication detection to
detect and block unsolicited e-mail (spam.) An address on a list is assigned to one
of m sublists, where m is an integer that is greater than one. A set of m different
messages are created. A different message from the set of m different messages is
sent to the addresses on each sublist. In this way, spam countermeasures based
upon duplicate detection schemes are foiled."

Right. And the other thing being foiled is Internet users' desire to be free of the spam plague. AT&T
should be ashamed of itself."