Not lazy, just annoyed

I don’t usually send in spam reports, but I submitted a couple in the last few weeks. Somehow an address of mine is on a bunch of rave / club lists in London. You want to know what is happening at London clubs this week? It’s all there in my spam folder.
This mail finally hit my annoyance threshold, so I’ve been submitting reports and complaints to the senders the last few weeks. The mail, with full headers, goes with an explanation that the address that received it was harvested off a website more than 5 years ago and never opted in to receive any mail.
One of the ISPs I sent the report to has a web form where the complainant and the customer can see the report and both can comment on it. The customer replied to my complaint on it.

Email compliant with best practice, lazy user. Have clicked the unsubscribe link for them

As you can imagine this annoyed me. I mean, I’m really happy they’re going to stop sending me spam advertising clubs a 12 hour plane flight away, but they could do that without claiming that I was a lazy user.
I replied to the complaint.

Despite what your customer says I am not a “lazy user.” The email was sent to an address harvested off a website more than 5 years ago. I never signed up for it, I never asked for it.
Your customer is a spammer.

To the ISP’s credit, they did take the complaint a lot more seriously than their customer.

Network access to server has been suspended

Boy, did that change the customer’s tune.

I will speak again to my customer and seek clarification from them as to the source of my email. My comment was in relation to email content such as headers and unsubscribe details

While I know it’s tempting to treat every complaint as a “lazy user” who just won’t unsubscribe, it can be a very bad idea. It’s not that I’m too lazy to hit the unsubscribe button, it’s that the sender is clearly a spammer, either buying or harvesting address lists. Why should I trust that spammer to actually honor an unsubscribe? I don’t. Thus, I send in a complaint.

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PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT A SPAM OR AUTOMATED EMAIL, IT’S ONLY A  REQUEST FOR A LINK EXCHANGE. YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS HAS NOT BEEN ADDED TO ANY LISTS, AND YOU WILL NOT BE CONTACTED AGAIN.IF YOU’D LIKE TO MAKE  SURE WE DON’T CONTACT YOU AGAIN, PLEASE FILL IN THE FOLLOWING FORM: <link>
PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGIES FOR CONTACTING YOU.

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A few months ago I got email from Staff of Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont, to an addresses scraped off one of my websites. At the bottom it says:

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We're gonna party like it's 1996!

Over on deliverability.com Dela Quist has a long blog post up talking about how changes to Hotmail and Gmail’s priority inbox are a class action suit waiting to happen.
All I can say is that it’s all been tried before. Cyberpromotions v. AOL started the ball rolling when they tried to use the First Amendment to force AOL to accept their unsolicited email. The courts said No.
Time goes on and things change. No one argues Sanford wasn’t spamming, he even admitted as much in his court documents. He was attempting to force AOL to accept his unsolicited commercial email for their users. Dela’s arguments center around solicited mail, though.
Do I really think that minor difference in terminology going to change things?
No.
First off “solicited” has a very squishy meaning when looking at any company, particularly large national brands. “We bought a list” and “This person made a purchase from us” are more common than any email marketer wants to admit to. Buying, selling and assuming permission are par for the course in the “legitimate” email marketing world. Just because the marketer tells me that I solicited their email does not actually mean I solicited their email.
Secondly, email marketers don’t get to dictate what recipients do and do not want. Do ISPs occasionally make boneheaded filtering decisions? I’d be a fool to say no. But more often than not when an ISP blocks your mail or filters it into the bulk folder they are doing it because the recipients don’t want that mail and don’t care that it’s in the bulk folder. Sorry, much of the incredibly important marketing mail isn’t actually that important to the recipient.
Dela mentions things like bank statements and bills. Does he really think that recipients are too stupid to add the from address to their address books? Or create specific filters so they can get the mail they want? People do this regularly and if they really want mail they have the tools, provided by the ISP, to make the mail they want get to where they want it.
Finally, there is this little law that protects ISPs. 47 USC 230 states:

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