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

Links for 9/2/09

People are still talking about the White House spamming. At Al Iverson’s Spam Resource there are two posts, one from Jaren Angerbauer titled Guest Post: Email and the White House and another from Al himself titled White House Spam, Signup Forgery, and GovDelivery. Both are insightful discussions of the spam that the White House has been sending. Over at ReturnPath, Stephanie Miller talks about how the publicity surrounding the spam is great PR for permission.
Stefan Pollard has an article at ClickZ looking at how an apology email in response to a recipient visible email mistake can actually make the fallout worse.
Web Ink Now documents one recipient’s experience with a bad, but all too common, subscription practice.
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Don’t forget to participate in the DKIM implementation survey. For ESPs. For ISPs. Check back next week for results.

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TWSD: My lunch is not spam

My ISP information page occasionally gets trackback pings from various blog posts. This week one of the trackbacks was from a blog post titled “One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch.” The theme of the blog post was that email marketers are poor, put upon business people that have to contend with all sorts of horrible responses from recipients, spam filtering companies and ISPs.
Since the poster took the time to link to my blog, I thought I’d take the time to look in detail at his post and talk about how likely it is to work.

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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.

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