Venkat has a longer analysis of the e360 v. Choicepoint case I commented on last week. He’s predicting a quick finding in favor of Choicepoint. I’m not a legal expert by any means, but I can see both sides of this particular case. And I am not sure there is good case law to guide the judge. Definitely one to keep an eye on.
ReturnPath sold its email change of address division to Fresh Address and spun off its email marketing division. Full announcement at the RP Blog and a copy of the press release at EmailKarma.
e360 petitioned the court earlier this week to compel Spamhaus to expand on their answers to e360’s interrogatories. Today the court denied the motion. Text of the motion at Mickey’s place.
There has been a noticeable increase in registrar phishing over the last week. This may be related to ICANN de-accrediting ESTHosts, a registrar well known in the anti-spam community for registering domains used in phising and spam. UPDATE from ICANN.
When we last visited our intrepid litigants, Spamhaus’ lawyers had filed a motion to dismiss citing yet another failure by e360 to meet a court ordered discovery deadline.
Let me set the stage.
e360 misses deadline after deadline during discovery. They skip depositions. They stall and provide incomplete answers weeks or months after they are due. Finally, in mid-July the Spamhaus’ lawyers file a motion for sanctions. The judge, while sounding a bit peeved (as I detailed in my Aug 29 post), gives e360 yet another chance to actually comply with discovery at a July 30 hearing.
And how, how does e360 respond to the taxed patience of the judge? They miss that deadline, too!
With the mid-August discovery deadline missed, Spamhaus’ lawyers file for dismissal. The plaintiffs race to repair the damage and find a scapegoat.
The scapegoat turns out to be Mr. Peters, one of the lawyers working the case. At the July 30 hearing he petitioned the judge to be released from the case as he was leaving Synergy (e360’s law firm). In their response to the motion to dismiss, the lead attorney blames Mr. Peters for the most recent e360 failure to comply with the judge’s ruling. According to the response Mr. Peters was, despite being removed from the case, responsible for complying with the July 30 ruling. Oh, and the mean old Spamhaus attorneys should have known that e360 was going to comply and did not contact Synergy before filing the motion to dismiss and it is just not FAIR, your honor!
With far more patience than I could muster, the judge agrees to a hearing about the motion to dismiss on September 4. At that time, he agrees to allow e360 to file a supplement to their response to the motion to dismiss and gives Spamhaus the opportunity to respond to that supplemental motion.
Wonder of wonders, e360 finally gets their act together and manages to meet a court ordered deadline when they filed their supplemental motion. Not only that, they included answers to the interrogatories sent by Spamhaus almost a year ago. Magically, the amount of damages e360 claims has gone up by an order of magnitude and 16 new people now know about e360’s financials. Too bad that the judge closed discovery on July 30.
e360’s answers included some interesting financial details, including the fact that e360 managed to sue itself out of business. That takes some serious talent. The other fascinating factoid is that a company with gross income of, roughly, 2.7 million dollars over 5 years is worth over 95 million dollars. While they do provide a formula for how they arrived at that figure, I am deeply suspicious of their claims.
Spamhaus’ response is on point and catalogs all the e360 discovery failures. This most recent failure to meet the court’s deadline is only one in a long line of failures. They emphasized the fact that they have petitioned the court four separate times to compel answers from e360. And, really, Judge, how many times do you want us to have to come back and waste everyone’s time pointing out that, yet again, e360 did not do what you told them they had to do?
The judge will be ruling by mail. No more hearings, the man is done with this. One thing that I have wondered about is why he seems to be prolonging the pain. But, the case has already been kicked back to him from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and I suspect he is loathe to do anything that might prompt a successful second appeal. Recent transcripts make it clear he is getting quite peeved that this is still on his docket. Really, all e360 had to do was provide the information they used to come up with the original 11M figure when the case was filed. Their reticence and inability to show any documentation on how they came up with that figure suggests that the figure may have been more wishful thinking than a real number.
donhburger: Why does Yahoo sell our email addresses to spammers?
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YMailRyan: We absolutely don’t sell your addresses to spammers. No IFs, ANDs, or BUTs about it.
imintrouble: My mom keeps emailing em but I never get it and usually it ends up in my spam box. Why? How do I make this stop? She’s getting pissed that I’m not replying.
YMailTeam: Oh no! Be sure your Mom is on your contact list– this should help keep mom out of spam box and put her back into your inbox.
buergej: Just why do I keep receiving the same kind of spam from a series of what appear to be women day after day after day?
YMailCarl: Spam is, unfortunately a constant problem for anyone using email. The reason you are receiving these emails is because spammers have somehow gotten a hold of your email address and are mailing you their lovely messages. There are several things you can do to assist with this. First, continue to report these messages as “Spam” by clicking the button at the top of the email labled “Spam”. Note that you don’t need to actually look at the message to do this. When you report items as spam it lets Yahoo! know that messages originating from that person are likely spam. This not only helps you, but helps other Yahoo! users as well.
YMailCarl: Second, if the emails are from similar names, you can set up filters in your email account to block those names and send them to your trash or spam folder.
YMailCarl: Obviously these messages you are receiving are not from women trying to sell you products personally – the messages are typically generated by a script which will try to forge or “spoof” the originating address.
YMailCarl: We agree that Spam is a serious issue and have many resources dedicated to fighting this problem.
YMailCarl: You can find some additional information about fighting spam here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/abuse/index.html
donhburger: Why when I mark Emails as Spam do I continue to get emils from the same persons?
YMailMaryn: When you mark a message as “spam” from within your Inbox that moves the message to your Spam Folder. And all subsequent messages that are sent from that particular sender will not be delivered to your Inbox, but will be delivered to your Spam Folder.