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Here's an interesting development on the war against spamming. Apparently, it is now becoming libelous to label someone a spammer. In his article, Don't Call It Spam, Forbes' Andy Greenberg reports on how labeling an email mass marketer, a spammer can land you in court. Here's a snippet of what he writes about this -

"When the Spamhaus Project, an organization devoted to cataloguing the Internet's most prolific spammers, placed marketer e360insight on a spammer "blacklist" in November 2003, the result was a $25 million lawsuit. E306insight founder David Linhardt says his Wheeling, Ill.-based marketing [firm] should never have been on Spamhaus' Registry of Known Spamming Operations...since his company landed on Spamhaus' list, it has been blocked from 4 million e-mail accounts, and has lost more than $3 million in revenue. "

Linhardt sued last year and won a judgement for $11.7M but Spamhaus, located in the UK has refused to pay. This kind of case may be unusual but I don't think we've heard the last of them...I'm quite sure disputes like this will continue to arise.

Part of the problem stems from a lack of a legal definition for spam. What is spam? If it's simply unwanted, unsolicited emails, there are many legitimate companies that fall into that category when all they are doing is simply marketing.

The notion of an opt-in list helps but isn't really an effective or fair solution. I hate spam as much as the next guy but I also have the perspective of running a small business and using email marketing campaigns as a means to promote a company webcast or new program. We mailed only to a mailing list that opted in but we were at times still accused as spamming by service providers. All it takes is one complain from a recepient from an opt-in list of thousands. Sometimes, the guy that opted in on behalf of the company had since departed...other times, the person who opted in forgot that he did so. We always got it cleared up with the ISPs but it was a hassle.

This is an interesting development because overall, I think from an end user's perspective, most ISPs appear to have gotten a decent handle on spam, unlike 2-3 years ago. To do so, besides the use of antispamming technology, they needed to adopt a strict stance against anything that looked or smelled like spam. But in the process, have legitimate companies been hurt? Or is this just the price you pay for the good of the entire Internet ecosystem?

Posted by andreyee in Odds and Ends |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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