Related Posts

Reunion.com sued under CA anti-spam law

Ethan Ackerman posted a rather long analysis of the class action lawsuit filed against Reunion.com over at Eric Goldman’s Technology and Law Blog. Part of the case is related to Reunion.com’s scraping of address books, something I have discussed here before.
The analysis goes through the case step by step and is well worth a read. There are a lot of issues being explored, including the applicability of CAN SPAM to “forward to a friend” email. This case also touches on CAN SPAM and preemption of state laws.
Definitely a post worth reading and a case worth keeping an eye on.

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FTC Opt out clarification

In early July, the Magilla Marketing newsletter has an article about how email preference centers may now be illegal due to the clarifications published by the FTC. Trevor Hughes of the ESPC is quoted extensively, lamenting about how marketers cannot legally interfere in the unsubscribe process.

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Negative branding, part 2

Last week I commented on negative branding in email. One of the comments on that post was an advertisement for a company called WrapMail. In the course of attempting to determine if this was spam or a real comment, I checked out their website. While the comment itself may not be spam, and it may not be providing services to spammers, the entire business model strikes me as a delivery nightmare.
Briefly, once you sign up with this company, you set your mail client to use their SMTP server. As all of your mail goes through their server is it “wrapped” with a HTML template of your choosing. All of your email is now branded with that template, allowing you to formally advertise your business even during the course of standard business communications.
There are multiple ways this can negatively impact a specific brand.

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