Amendment is futile.

Late last month, Yahoo filed a motion to dismiss in the Holomaxx v. Yahoo case. There’s nothing that unexpected in the filing. The lawyers set the tone of the entire document with their very first paragraph.

This is a lawsuit by a frustrated spammer to attempt to force Defendant Yahoo! Inc. (“Yahoo!”) to deliver millions of Plaintiff’s mass marketing emails each day to Yahoo! customers— namely, users of Yahoo! Mail. No matter the legal theory Plaintiff advances, Yahoo! has no legal obligation to do so. Several courts already have confronted similar claims and soundly rejected attempts by mass e-mail marketers to impose civil liability on email service providers like Yahoo! for blocking bulk commercial email. This Court should as well.

They go on to point out that the communications decency act explicitly immunizes them from liability for their blocking decisions. Yahoo! also spends multiple paragraphs pointing out that the initial lawsuit is deficient legally as it false to state a claim of violation for many of the provisions.
Yahoo! describes their interactions with Holomaxx in 2 paragraphs.

Plaintiff is a self-described mass marketer that attempts to send over 6 million “marketing” emails per day to Yahoo! users. Compl. ¶ 16. By Plaintiff’s own characterization, Yahoo! users complained consistently and vociferously about Plaintiff’s spamming, registering between 6,000- 18,000 complaints a day about Plaintiff’s marketing activities. Id. ¶ 18. In an effort to assist Plaintiff in better complying with Yahoo!’s terms of use, Yahoo! both warned Plaintiff about the escalating user complaints and directed Plaintiff to review and implement Yahoo’s policy on email use and best practices. Id. ¶ 41(a), (c).
Plaintiff does not allege it ever complied with these best practices. Nor does Plaintiff allege that Yahoo! deviated in any way from its standard policies in filtering Plaintiff’s emails as spam. The application of Yahoo!’s usual and customary filtering techniques, triggered by the virtual tidal wave of Plaintiff’s mass marketing emails and resulting Yahoo! user complaints, coupled with Plaintiff’s apparent failure to bring its practices in conformity with Yahoo!’s policies, resulted in the blockage of “most” of Plaintiff’s emails by Yahoo! servers, prior to delivery. See id.

There’s a real nugget of information in this paragraph. If we look at the numbers here (6,000,000 emails a day and 6,000 to 18,000 complaints) we can infer that the Yahoo! filters kick in at a complaint rate between 0.1 and 0.3%.
One of the Holomaxx allegations is that Yahoo! is in violation of federal wiretap laws and illegally accessed mail stored on Yahoo!’s own servers. Yahoo! laughs in the face of these allegations. This is not an area of law I am that familiar with so I don’t have much commentary.
There were two places in the document where Yahoo!’s lawyers use the phrase “black letter law.”  One was in reference to the alleged violation of the federal wiretap statute.

It is black letter law that accessing emails while they are in storage does not qualify as an “interception” under the Act, since for purposes of the Act, interception means acquisition at the time of transmission. See Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, 36 F.3d 457, 460 (5th Cir. 1994). Electronic communications in storage are specifically excluded from reach of the Act.    In making this distinction, Congress not only carved out access to electronically stored communications as an actionable Wiretap violation, but “deliberately structured [ECPA] to afford electronic communications in storage less protection than other forms of communication.”

The second was in reference to the alleged violations of CA state law. Yahoo! asserts that it is under no legal obligation to deliver plaintiff’s mail and that Yahoo!’s conduct was justified. Yahoo! also asserts that it is black letter law that not every interference in a contract is an actual tort.

Interference with a contract is justified “when the person is seeking to protect an interest of greater social value than that attached to the stability of the contract involved.” […] In this case, Yahoo! is justified by its own economic interest in being able to provide email services that promote a good user experience (i.e., as free as practicable from bulk email advertisements), and that do not tax its systems and resources. There is also a broader social interest at stake in reducing exposure to bulk email.

Yahoo concludes their motion:

For the reasons stated above, Plaintiff’s Complaint should be dismissed in its entirety without leave to amend. Amendment would be futile in this case.

I’m not a legal scholar, but this looks like a solid motion. I would actually be surprised if the judge doesn’t grant the motion to dismiss without leave to amend. ISPs are very protected against liability for their good faith spam filtering decisions. The whole argument about wiretapping seems to be an attempt to find some cause of action. Yahoo! is very clear that there is no case and they are immunized.
I’d like to see both this case and the Holomaxx v. Microsoft case go to trial, if only because they are being heard near here and I could actually go. But I don’t expect that to happen. I just don’t think Holomaxx has a case.

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Why do ISPs do that?

One of the most common things I hear is “but why does the ISP do it that way?” The generic answer for that question is: because it works for them and meets their needs. Anyone designing a mail system has to implement some sort of spam filtering and will have to accept the potential for lost mail. Even the those recipients who runs no software filtering may lose mail. Their spamfilter is the delete key and sometimes they’ll delete a real mail.
Every mailserver admin, whether managing a MTA for a corporation, an ISP or themselves inevitably looks at the question of false positives and false negatives. Some are more sensitive to false negatives and would rather block real mail than have to wade through a mailbox full of spam. Others are more sensitive to false positives and would rather deal with unfiltered spam than risk losing mail.
At the ISPs, many of these decisions aren’t made by one person, but the decisions are driven by the business philosophy, requirements and technology. The different consumer ISPs have different philosophies and these show in their spamfiltering.
Gmail, for instance, has a lot of faith in their ability to sort, classify and rank text. This is, after all, what Google does. Therefore, they accept most of the email delivered to Gmail users and then sort after the fact. This fits their technology, their available resources and their business philosophy. They leave as much filtering at the enduser level as they can.
Yahoo, on the other hand, chooses to filter mail at the MTA. While their spamfoldering algorithms are good, they don’t want to waste CPU and filtering effort on mail that they think may be spam. So, they choose to block heavily at the edge, going so far as to rate limit senders that they don’t know about the mail. Endusers are protected from malicious mail and senders have the ability to retry mail until it is accepted.
The same types of entries could be written about Hotmail or AOL. They could even be written about the various spam filter vendors and blocklists. Every company has their own way of doing things and their way reflects their underlying business philosophy.

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Comments on Holomaxx post

I’m putting together a longer analysis of the Holomaxx case that will look at the claims against the various defendants. There’s some deep mis-understanding of how various things works (hint: wiretapping? not so much).
There was one comment from “The Other Barry” about complaints that I think bears highlighting.

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Email and law in the news

A couple things related to the intersection of email and law happened recently.
The 6th circuit court ruled that the government must have a search warrant before accessing email. The published opinion is interesting reading, not just because of the courts ruling on the law but also because of the defendant. Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals toyed with spamming to advertise their product as a brief search of public reporting sites shows. The extent and effort they went to in order to stay below the thresholds for losing their merchant accounts is reminiscent of the effort some mailers go through to get mail through ISP filters.
The other bit of interesting reading is the Microsoft motion to dismiss the case brought against them by Holomaxx. It is a relatively short brief (33 pages) and 3 of those pages are simply a listing of the relevant cases demonstrating ISPs are allowed to filter mail as they see fit. 2 more pages are dedicated to listing the relevant Federal and State statutes. I strongly encourage anyone considering suing any large ISP to to read this pleading. These lawyers understand email law inside and out and they are not going to mess around. They also have both statute and case law on their side. They point this out before the end of page 1:

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