This month in email: September 2013

laura
Industry
September 30, 2013

Looking back through the month of September there were a couple things talked about on the blog.

Legal cases discussed

I wrote quite a bit about the Google wiretapping case. In this potential class action suit, a number of plaintiffs are suing Google for intercepting emails in violation of the federal wiretapping statutes and state wiretapping laws. On September 5th I attended a hearing on Google’s motion to dismiss in San Jose. The judge issued her ruling on September 26, allowing the case to move forward on most counts. I did a post on the federal claims and some of the judge’s reasons for allowing the case to go forward.
In other court cases, Al guest blogged about Spamarrest losing in court.
I also discussed two instances of companies looking for patent infringers in the email space.

ISP specific issues

The big issue in September was Yahoo releasing recycled addresses. The addresses were handed over at the end of August, but by mid-September we started hearing stories of personal information leaking to the wrong people. Yahoo started scrambling to cope with the problem.

Industry and technical commentary

I did a post about ISP relationships and how who you know is becoming less and less important for email delivery. I also looked at “the volume question” and discussed how volume can affect email delivery. Finally, Steve talked about tips and techniques for analyzing email on the fly without dropping everything into a database.

Gmail says no expectation of privacy, kinda.

Consumer Watch put out a press release yesterday about a court filing made by Gmail that says Gmail users have no expectation of privacy. I pulled a bunch of the docs yesterday, but have had no real time to read or digest them.
For recap users everything I pulled (and stuff other people have pulled) are available at Archive.org.
The initial complaint was filed under seal at the request of Google. The redacted complaint doesn’t tell us a lot, but it’s available for people to read if they’re interested.
The doc everyone is talking about is Google’s Motion to Dismiss. Everyone is up in arms about Google saying, in that filing, “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” (page 28, line 9). What no one seems to have mentioned is that this is actually a quote from a case that Google is referencing. The whole paragraph may lead one to a different conclusion.

Wiretapping and email

An Alabama resident is suing Yahoo for violating the California wiretapping law. Specifically he’s suing under CA Penal Code section 631. The thing is, this section of the law deals with wiretapping over “telephone or telegraph” wires. That doesn’t seem to apply in this case as Yahoo isn’t using either telephone or telegraph wires to transmit their packets.
Holomaxx tried the wiretapping argument when they sued Yahoo and Hotmail. That case cited a cause of action under both federal law and California law. The wiretapping claim was addressed specifically by the lawyers for the defendants.

Google wiretapping case, what the judge ruled

Yesterday I reported that the judge had ruled on Google’s motion to dismiss. Today I’ll take a little bit deeper look at the case and the interesting things that were in denial of the motion to dismiss.
Google is being sued for violations of federal wiretapping laws, the California invasion of privacy act (CIPA) and wiretapping laws in Florida, Pennsylvania and Maryland. This lawsuit is awaiting class certification for the following groups.