The US DOJ announced today the guilty plea of David Patton. Patton was charged with “aiding and abetting violations of the CAN SPAM act. Software written by Patton’s company provided the ability to modify email headers and use open proxies to disguise the source of the email.
The Ralsky convictions are, to the best of my knowledge, the first criminal prosecution for CAN SPAM violations and so far 9 of the 12 defendents charged have pled guilty.
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.
Ethan Ackerman has a summary of recent cases where judges are splitting over rulings on CAN SPAM pre-emption.
Read MoreLast 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.