Earlier this week ARS Technica reported on a ruling from the Missouri Court of Appeals stating that terms and conditions are enforceable even if the users are not forced to visit the T&C pages. Judge Rahmeyer, one of the panel members, did point out that the term in question, under what state laws the agreement would be enforced, was not an unreasonable request. She “do[es] not want...
This is a post I’ve put off for a while as the definition of spam is a sticky subject. There are online fora where the definition of spam has been debated for more than 10 years, and if there isn’t a working definition after all that time, it’s unlikely there will ever be a definition the participants can agree on. This came up again recently because one of the comments on my...
… the best thing you have to say about your email practices is “They’re CAN SPAM compliant.”
… text to .gif is a vital part of your email generation process
… you have to mail from multiple ESPs in order to get good delivery
Please contribute your own in the comments.
I’d also like to thank Al for guest posting 2 days this week. Thanks, Al!
Eric Goldman reviews the appeals court decision in Gordon vs. Virtumundo. This case is exceedingly interesting and important because it destroys the arguments of anti-spam plaintiffs trying to manufacture technical violations of CAN-SPAM for their profit. Not only does the opinion send an unmistakable message to the lower courts to toss these plaintiffs out on their keister, but it sends the...
A fellow delivery specialist sent me a question this morning. What is your opinion on putting CAN SPAM compliance information (postal address, unsubscribe link, etc) in an image? The short answer is this is something spammers do and something that legitimate mailers should never want to do. The longer answer needs to look at why spammers do this, why legitimate marketers may think about doing...
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...
Al Ralsky has long been known as “the king of spam.” He has a long history of spamming, suing ISPs who block his mail and refusing to provide him with connectivity. He was profiled in the Detroit Free Press based on his spamming activity more than 5 years ago. He also has a history of convictions for fraud and other related crimes. Yesterday, he and some of his family and business...
Ethan Ackerman has a summary of recent cases where judges are splitting over rulings on CAN SPAM pre-emption.
Penton Media’s Marketing Practices Ken Magill responds to critics of Penton’s email marketing practices in an article out today. His article is quite open and points out that some of the things Penton does are not good. A couple answers weren’t pretty. For one thing, I found out we don’t have a permission box asking people if they want to receive third party ads. We simply start...
Another installment in my ongoing series: That’s What Spammers Do. In today’s installment we take a look at a company deceiving recipients and hiding their real identity. One of my disposable addresses has been getting heavily spammed from mylife.com. The subject lines are not just deceptive, they are provably lies. The mail is coming from random domains like urlprotect.com or...
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