Sanford Wallace goes to Jail

Sanford Wallace has been sentenced to 2 years in jail by the US District court in San Jose for contempt of court and electronic mail fraud. Sanford has been around for more than 2 decades. He is one of the spammers that drove me to learn how to read headers and report spam back in the late nineties.
White Collar Crime.
Sanford has been in and out of courts and the news almost as long as he’s been spamming. When I dug into Pacer this morning to grab a copy of the sentencing report I see multiple cases, some going back as far as 1996. There aren’t electronic records for Concentric Network v. Wallace, et al. (case: 5:96-cv-20829-RMW) but the final disposition of the case says “Permanent Injunction.”

While the Court agreed that AOL had indeed opened its e-mail system to the public, that was not enough to establish that AOL was performing an “exclusive public function” because AOL’s operation of its e-mail system was not an exercise of municipal power or an essential public service. Thus, AOL had a right to block Cyber’s spam to AOL’s members. Netlitigation Review

He started with unsolicited marketing before email. He was a prolific sender of junk faxes. In fact, one of the reasons junk faxing is illegal is directly due to Sanford. As the story goes, when Congress was discussing prohibiting junk faxing, Sanford decided to flood their offices with faxes. This annoyed them so much they made it illegal.
After the death of junk faxing, Sanford moved to email. His first few domains were things like savetrees.com. Because email saves paper or something. In 1996 Sanford sued AOL for blocking his mail. He lost. You can read about the CyberPromotions vs. American Online, Inc. case.
Sanford moved on from email spam in the early 2000s. This was after being involved in many other cases and helping create the body of case law that says ISPs can block spam. He built businesses around advertising and fraud on MySpace and then moved on to Facebook. Facebook took him to court (sound familiar?) and the Facebook case laid the groundwork for the grand jury to indict Sanford on criminal charges.
Many of us who started fighting spam in the late 90s tangled with Sanford. A group of us even sat on a conference call with him to discuss his idea for an email marketing supported backbone. His proposal was free access to consumers, in return for having no email filters and receiving advertising in their mailbox. As long as the consumers opted in to this, I had no real problem with it. I didn’t think it would work, but there wasn’t abuse of other networks involved so more power to him.
His spam supporting network never materialized and he moved on. What he never did was stop finding new ways to intrude on people’s environment to try and sell them something. Maybe his time in jail and the mandatory mental health treatment afterwards will mark a true turning point. But, despite his lawyers claim that he’s finally learned his lesson from the criminal charge, I expect that it’s very possible we still haven’t heard the last of sanford.

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Memories of Spam in May

This morning on Facebook a friend posted a picture saying that 15 years ago was the very first anti-spam conference (Spamcon*). All we have are some blurry scans of pictures and coffee mugs.
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That 550 sign belonged to the bar where the night out was held. It got bought by K & P and lived in their garden until it rotted away a few years ago. So many folks who are still active in the space, and so many folks who’ve moved on. Names I’d forgotten, faces I haven’t.
Many of those folks are still working in email. Some on the sending side, some on the tools and vendor side, some on the ISP side, some on the consulting side.  That conference was one of the very first times people publicly gathered to talk about spam. There were other occasions, but most were invite only with hand picked representatives of specific companies.
At that first Spamcon I was freshly laid off from MAPS (now Trend Micro). I was considering what next. The thing is, I really liked the work I was doing. MAPS had me leading a team to provide abuse desk as an outsourced service. We had a very large network provider as a customer and we were handling all the mail that came into abuse@ there. It was a challenge, I was creating processes and documenting policy, trying to do more with less and managing my first team ever.
Much of what I do now, here, grew out of that position. It was clear even then there was a need for someone who could help navigate the challenges of email.
In the same thread another person posted pictures from a social night in DC during the FTC Spam Forum. More folks, some I have lost touch with and some who are still friends and colleagues.
We were so young. All of us.
This is yet another form of community that email created. Some of it was built over email, but a lot of it happened on USENET and IRC and local meetups. There were so many ways we built community using plain text and dialup. The technology has changed, and that community from a dozen years ago has changed but it’s still all the same deep down inside.
SpamconMugs
 
(* If, at any point, you see me type Spamconk instead of Spamcon please blame autocorrect. It’s being difficult and even tries to correct it when I go back and edit sentences.)

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CheckboxEarlier this week I posted about the increased amount of B2B spam I’m receiving. One message is not a huge deal and I just delete and move on. But many folks are using marketing automation to send a series of emails. These emails often violate CAN SPAM in one way or another.
This has been the law for 13 years now, I find it difficult to believe marketers are still unaware of what it says. But, for the sake of argument, let’s talk about CAN SPAM.

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