A blast from the past

I’m sitting here watching Iron Chef (the real one, not the American version) and surfing around on SFGate.com. It’s a slow night catching up on all the news I’ve missed this week while off traveling. I see a link on the front page: “Web marketer ordered to pay Facebook $711M.” As I click I wonder if I know the web marketer in question. A former client? A name I recognize?

Facebook said Thursday a California court has awarded the social networking Web site $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace.”

Sanford. Wallace.
The man who so abused junk faxes in the early 1990s that Congress passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991.
The man who was one of the early, notorious players in the spam industry.
A man who was one of the first spammers sued by a large ISP, and lost.
The man who sued AOL in 1997 and lost, creating some of the first case law that allows ISPs to block mail that their users don’t want.
A man who has reveled in his status as a rogue, pushing limits and making money for himself.
A man who has gone from dubious enterprise to dubious enterprise, changing fields when the legal bills and judgments got too high.
Sanford. Wallace.
I still remember some of the first spam I got from savetress.com, one of Cyberpromo’s primary domains. The first few messages were annoying, but when I started getting tens of spam a day (yes, tens, it was a different world on the ‘net then) I decided to start learning about email, how it worked and how to protect my accounts from spam. It was his lawsuit against AGIS that prompted my first foray into the net-abuse newsgroups. Talking with Sanford about his new, legitimate marketing business was my first experience in negotiating with spammers. While I hate to actually say “Sanford Wallace changed my life,” it’s not that far from the truth. Frustration over his spam led me to a career of being an email expert. Interaction with people as frustrated as I was not only introduced me to a new circle of friends, it also resulted in me meeting the man who is now my husband.
I just spent 3 days with a bunch of people who make email work; talking and troubleshooting with them to figure out just how to keep email working and useful in the face of massive and sophisticated spam attacks few of us imagined 10+ years ago. I don’t often think about what it was like when I was first on the internet, when you could actually open an unfiltered mailbox and have only mail from friends (or no mail at all!). How ironic that while winding down from that conference I find that Sanford is, once again, losing a lawsuit for abusing the internet.

Related Posts

Suppressing email addresses: it's good for everyone

Every sender, big or small, should have the ability to suppress sending to any particular email address. They must, absolutely, be able to stop sending mail to anyone for any reason. Not only is this a legal requirement in every jursidiction that has laws about email marketing, it’s just good business sense.
What happens when marketers fail to be able to suppress email addresses? At some point they’re going to mail someone who gets annoyed enough with them to make it public that they are too incompetent to run an email program.
This happened to the folks over at spamfighter.com recently. They have been spamming Neil Schwartzman (spamfighter, Executive director of CAUCE North America, Director of Standards and Certification at ReturnPath) since somewhere in 2007. Yes, really, 2007. Neil has asked them politely to stop spamming him. He’s explained he’s not actually using their software. They appear to be incapable of running a suppression list, despite telling him 3 times that they have removed his address.
Showing much more restraint than I would have with a sender who couldn’t stop sending me email, Neil gave them years to fix their process before blogging about his experiences. Instead of fixing their broken process they instead responded to his blog post insisting their mail wasn’t spam because they weren’t sending Viagra mail or 3rd party offers.
We can argue about the definition of opt-in, we can argue about whether registration is permission, we can argue about a lot of things, but when the recipients says “stop sending me email” and a sender says “we’ll stop sending you email” and then fails to actually stop sending email I think the recipient is fully justified in calling the email spam. Sorry spamfighter.com, your process is broken and your inability to fix it 2 years after the brokenness was brought to your attention does not give anyone a good impression.
Every email sender should have the ability to stop sending mail to recipients. If that’s not currently possible with your technology, it should be a very high development priority.

Read More

Links for 9/29/09

A little bit of link sharing today.
Mark Brownlow posts about how critical clicks are to conversion. He also looks at successful techniques that various marketers have used to engage customers.
Chris Wheeler has an insightful post at SpamResource discussing reputation, engagement and what the ISPs are looking at when making delivery decisions. J.D. Falk touches on some of the same themes in his blog post “The Spam Folder is Your Chance to Shine.”
Neil Schwartzman talks about delivery emergencies from the ISP side of the desk.
Terry Zink gives a brief background on sender reputation and a followup looking at how ISPs are working to prevent spammers from stealing their reputations.
Seth Godin continues to turn marketing on his head with his discussion of how marketers have gone from renting to owning.

Read More

Defining spam

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 “Reputation is not permission” post took me to task for daring to call the mail “spam.” I’m going to assert here that the mail was unsolicited bulk email. I did not ask for it and I know at least 4 other people that received it.
The commenter, and a few marketers, argue that if the mail is sent without any forgery and the mail contains an opt-out link then it is not spam. It is a definition I have only seen folks who want to send unsolicited bulk email use, however. What they are really arguing is their mail isn’t spam because they provide a valid return address and a way to opt-out. Few people actually agree with this definition.
Here are 10 of the many definitions of spam that I’ve seen.

Read More