e360 v. Comcast: part 1

A few weeks ago I very briefly touched on the recent lawsuits filed by e360 against Comcast and a group of anti-spammers. In the Comcast suit (complaint here) e360 argues that Comcast is unfairly and incorrectly blocking e360’s email and are liable for damages to e360’s business.
They have a number of claims, including

  1. Comcast cannot block e360’s mail because it is CAN SPAM compliant
  2. e360 complies with Comcast’s AUP
  3. Comcast lets e360’s competitors send mail to Comcast’s users
  4. Comcast is lying to e360 when they reject mail, causing e360 to delete valid addresses from their email list
  5. Comcast is committing a denial of service attack against e360 by tarpitting email.
  6. Comcast is mean and will not tell e360 exactly why the mail is being refused.

The original complaint seems to be a list of complaints that e360 cannot effectively send mail to Comcast. Because other mailers can meet Comcast’s standards, this leaves e360 at a competitive disadvantage and therefore Comcast must change their filtering policies to allow e360 to send mail into Comcast users.
Two of the claims are peculiar. One that Comcast is lying to e360 with their block messages. As an example, e360 claims that

Comcast has transmitted fraudulent bounce information to e360’s mail servers specific to email addresses contained on e360’s opt-in marketing list. The responses sent by Comcast mail servers to e360 are fraudulent because they contain information indicating that the email address is invalid and not active.

Elsewhere in the filing e360 says:

e360 received the following error message from Comcast for all of the messages e360 attempted to send. “550 5.2.0 63.210.103.209 blocked by ldap:ou=rblmx,dc=comcast,dc=net -> BL004 Blocked for spam. Please see http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=SecurityMail_Policy18628”

I see what e360 is trying to claim here, that a 550 response means the address is invalid according to RFC821/2821. I do not think they are going to get very far with this claim, as a plain reading of the response text makes it clear why the mail is not being accepted and provides a path to resolution. Furthermore, close reading of the RFCs makes it clear that 550 is a response used for unknown users or access denied. Clearly, Comcast refusing email from e360 falls into the access denied category of the RFCs.
The other peculiar claim is that Comcast is committing a denial of service attack against e360 by tarpitting e360’s servers. There is absolutely no way that Comcast can cause a problem for e360 in this manner unless e360 cooperates. If any connection is open and little or no traffic has been sent and this is causing you problems then drop the connection. There is no reason to hurt your own systems by keeping silent connections open.
To my non-legal eyes, I do not think e360 has much of a case. Not only is Comcast protected by statute, including the CDA, there is also case law going back more than 10 years saying that ISPs can block mail. This seems to be an attempt by e360 to force ISPs to accept unwanted email.
Comcast responded to the suit earlier this week. Tomorrow I will post about their response, and oh, what a response!

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Predictions for 2008

I did not have a lot of predictions for what will happen with email at the beginning of the year so I did not do a traditional beginning of the year post. Over the last 3 – 4 weeks, though, I have noticed some things that I think show where the industry is going.
Authentication. In January two announcements happened that lead me to believe most legitimate mail will be DK/DKIM signed by the end of the year. AOTA announced that approximately 50% of all email was currently authenticated. They did not separate out SPF/SenderID authentication from DK/DKIM authentication, but this still suggests email authentication is being widely adopted. AOL announced they will be checking DKIM on their inbound mail. I expect more and more email will be DKIM signed in response to this announcement.
Filtering. The end of 2007 marked a steady uptick in mail being filtered or blocked by recipient domains. I expect this trend to continue throughout 2008. Recipient domains are rolling out new technology to measure complaints, evaluate reputation and monitor unwanted email in ways that tease out the bad actors from the good. This means more bad and borderline email will be blocked. Over the short term, I expect to see more good email blocked, too, but expect this will resolve itself by Q2/Q3.
Sender Improvements. As the ISPs get better at filtering, I expect that many borderline senders will discover they cannot continue to have sloppy subscription practices and still get their mail delivered. Improved authentication and better filtering let ISPs pin-point blocks. Instead of having to block by IP or by domain, they can block only some mail from a domain, or only some mail from an IP. There are a number of senders who are sending mail that users do not want mixed with mail that recipients do want. Right now, if there is more mail that recipients want in that mix, then ISPs let the mail through. This will not continue to happen through 2008. Senders will need to send mail users actively want in order to see good delivery.
Less is more. A lot of other email bloggers have talked about this, and I will echo their predictions. Less email is more. Send relevant mail that your customers want. Target, target, target. Good mailers will not send offers to their entire database, instead they will send mail to a select portion of their database.
Feedback loops. Use of feedback loops by recipient domains will continue to grow.
Mobile email. More recipients will be receiving email on mobile devices.
Suggestions for 2008

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e360 in court again

Today’s edition of Magilla Marketing announced that Dave Linhardt and e360 have sued Comcast. Spamsuite.com has the text of the complaint up.
On the surface this seems quite silly. e360 is alleging a number of things, including that Comcast is committing a denial of service attack against e360 and locking up e360’s servers for more than 5 hours. Additionally, e360 is laying blame at the feet of multiple spam filtering companies, including Spamhaus, Trend Micro and Brightmail.
One of the more absurd claims is that Comcast is fraudulently transmitting ‘user unknown’ messages. At no point do they explain how or why they think this is the case, but simply assert:

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Roadrunner turns images off by default

Earlier this week DirectMag published an article talking about RoadRunner blocking images by default. I did talk to someone over at RoadRunner and found out a few more details about this change.
What is happening is that RR is rolling out a new web interface. This interface has both a bulk/spam filter and has images disabled by default.
I do not expect sender to notice this change in the open rates of RoadRunner addresses. Most RoadRunner customers use their own mail client (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc.) and not the RR web interface. The number of uses this change touches is a very small fraction of the RR users.

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