SPAM company sues a complainent

June 4, 2002 6:35 PM

SPAM company sues a complainent Not another spam story! But this one is a bit twisted. An Australian man, sick of receiving junk email, posted the details of the marketing company responsible on a website. SPEWS discovered the information, blocked their server, and now the spammers are suing the man for lost profits.
posted by Jimbob (8 comments total)

I hope the man countersues the farkers for all they're worth. Die spammer scum, die!
posted by clevershark at 6:45 PM on June 4, 2002

It's true; remember way back when Hotmail was actually usable? Now the only way you can avoid getting tons of spam is to set the filter to the tip-top exclusive setting, rendering it fairly useless. Otherwise you have to ban several entire domains a day until your quota of 250 is full, which took about a week for me. As long as spammers are allowed to do whatever they want, they'll keep circumventing all of the anti-spam tools people come with. If this trend continues, email will be next to useless, simply not worth bothering with as a medium any more.

I wonder how that would be for business?
posted by Poagao at 7:38 PM on June 4, 2002

I could never actually get an email to one of my friends who used hotmail as every day her inbox was so spam filled they all just bounced back. She emptied it every day and has never signed up to anything...

People sue too much anyway. *nods wisely*
posted by hugsnkisses at 5:32 AM on June 5, 2002

"they'll keep circumventing all of the anti-spam tools"

Not one single piece of spam has made it past my SpamAssassin and Razor filters, and a couple hundred per week make the attempt. As long as spammers are idiots, they will be easy to filter out.

While it's possible the suit might have some legal basis -- I'm not in a position to interpret the applicable laws -- I believe it is every net user's responsibility to block, filter, and disconnect spammers.
posted by majick at 6:31 AM on June 5, 2002

The spammers are obviously suing the wrong people just to intimidate the anti-spam crusade. It sounds like their ISP cut them off for TOS violations, but rather than take issue with the ISP, they're suing the guys who ratted them out. I mean, if the complaint was really "unfounded," they could sue the ISP for groundless termination of services.

Silly wankers. I hope they drown in a sea of legal fees.
posted by junkbox at 6:48 AM on June 5, 2002

I've got a game in which you compete with other players for the most spam. Finally a game we can all be good at.
posted by fnirt at 6:58 AM on June 5, 2002

I use spamcop.net - and route all my email through it. for a small fee I'm getting exactly 0 spams a day. You can use his parser for free for spam reporting if paying for an email account isn't what you want to do, but I think the service is well worth the cost.
posted by Nauip at 11:20 AM on June 5, 2002

I can't think of a jurisdiction here in the United States where that lawsuit would make it past the Motion to Dismiss stage. In order to establish liability, the spammers must first establish that the defendnant had some sort of duty to them - either in contract or one imposed by staute or common law - to keep their information secret.

As best as I can tell, the Australian suit seems to be based on some sort of defamation theory, that the information posted was somehow false or misleading. Again, I doubt they would be able to make such a good-faith claim here in the States.

And after winning dismissal, they would be fortunante to avoid paying sanctions - including legal bills - to the defendant.
posted by mikewas at 12:19 PM on June 5, 2002