TWSD: breaking the law

I tell my clients that they should comply with CAN SPAM (physical postal address and unsubscribe option) even if the mail they are sending is technically exempt. The bar for legality is so low, there is no reason not to.
Sure, there is a lot of spam out there that does not comply with CAN SPAM. Everything you see from botnets and proxies is in violation, although many of those mails do actually meet the postal address and unsubscribe requirements.
One of my spams recently caught my eye today with their disclaimer on the bottom: “This email message is CAN SPAM ACT of 2003 Compliant.” The really funny bit is that it does not actually comply with the law. Even better, the address it was sent to is not published anywhere, so the company could also be nailed for a dictionary attack and face enhanced penalties.
It reminds me of the old spams that claimed they complied with S.1618.

In accordance with Bill S.1618 Title III passed by the 105th U. S. Congress, this letter can not be considered spam as long as we include: (1) Contact information and (2) a way to be removed from future mailings.

That bill was passed, but never signed into law. That did not stop spammers from adding the disclaimer to spam, though. When I was working as abuse@ we actually treated the presence of the Murkowski disclaimer (the original bill was sponsored by Senator Murkowski) as a defacto sign that our customer was spamming. It was not a bad rule of thumb, either. People who used that disclaimer usually did not have permission to send the mail they were sending. Murkowski disclaimers were common up until mid-2003, and every once in a while they will still be seen in spam.
All readers who may be thinking of actually buying SEO services, avoid Internet-marketing-one.com. They may tell you they will comply with the law, but if their spam is any evidence they do not.

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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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Email and the Obama Campaign

Late in the summer there were people talking about the spam coming from Senator Obama’s presidential campaign. At that time, most of the discussion was focused on the open subscription form on their website and that there were some individuals who had been fraudulently signed up and were now receiving email from the campaign.
Last week, the Senator’s campaign again became a topic of discussion among some anti-spam groups. The maintainer of one of the more respected public blocklists and members of his family received mail from Senator Obama’s presidential campaign at their personal addresses. Because the mail was unsolicited and met the qualifications for listing, the sending IP addresses were listed on the blocklist. In response, the campaign’s ESP started moving the Senator’s mail to other IP addresses, resulting in those IPs also being listed on the blocklist as well.
I talked with the blocklist maintainer and I believe that his address, and those of his family members, were added to the Senator’s mailing list as the result of an email append. All of them are registered Democrats and they all live in a battleground state.
This may have made for good campaign strategy, not being an expert I cannot comment on that. It is, however, very poor email marketing strategy.
First, the campaign decided to appropriate permission to send email. There is not ever permission associated with an email append. Just because you have a name and a street address does not mean that you have permission to send email. In very, very limited circumstances, an opt-in append (click here to continue receiving email) may be acceptable. However, that is not how appending is normally done.
There is no pretense of permission to send email. Just because someone is registered to a particular party does not mean they want to receive email from that party.
Second, when the campaign started seeing delivery problems they started sending off different IP addresses. Moving IPs around is out and out spammer behavior, no questions asked.
Now, I know this is a very hotly contested election and I know that some people believe that any method of getting the word out is good. I also expect that there may have been some positive reaction from recipients. The overall reaction, based on the IPs changing, may not have been so positive.
Do I really believe that Senator Obama is a evil and willful spammer? No, not really. But that does not change the fact that the Obama campaign seems to be sending email without the permission of the recipient and seem to be attempting to evade blocks by moving IP addresses.
From a marketing perspective, the campaign may be using email effectively and doing everything right. But from an email delivery perspective, they are getting many, many of the basics wrong and are looking like spammers in the process.
Other news and blogs that talk about spam from the Obama campaign:

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Monitoring customers at ESPs

In the past I’ve talked about vetting clients, and what best effort encompasses when ESPS try to keep bad actors out of their systems. But what does an ESP do to monitor clients ongoing? Al Iverson from ExactTarget says that they:

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