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Mickey's take on e360 settlement

Mickey has the full docs of the settlement, and talks about the implications of the confession of judgment.

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Comcast and e360 settle lawsuit

e360 initially filed suit against Comcast early in 2008. They asserted a number of things, including that Comcast was fraudulently returning “user unknown” notices and that they were certified by ReturnPath. Comcast filed a countersuit alleging violations of CAN SPAM, violations of the computer fraud and abuse act, as well as a number of other things including abuse of process. In April of 2008 the judge ruled in favor of Comcast and dismissed e360’s case, while allowing the countersuit to proceed.
Over the last 18 months, the suit has moved through the courts. There have been significant delays in the case, and e360 seems to have been dragging their feet based on some of the motions filed by Comcast asking the judge to compel e360 to follow through on discovery.
Today, only weeks before the trial date, a settlement agreement was filed. The settlement agreement prohibits the defendants and any group associated with them from transmitting email to any domain owned by Comcast without affirmative consent (as defined by CAN SPAM). All mail sent by the defendants must comply with the Comcast Terms of Use or AUP. The defendants must not attempt to circumvent Comcast’s spam filters, must comply with CAN SPAM and must not help anyone else violate any of the provisions of the agreement.
The agreement also prohibits mail from defendants that:

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20M leads a month

Some back of the envelope calculations.

20M “opt-in” leads a month is roughly 650,000 leads a day.

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Links for 1/15/10

A lot has happened this week.
Spammers and scammers are attempting to steal money from people attempting to donate money to those in earthquake devastated Haiti. A number of places, including CNN and CAUCE, are warning people who want to donate online to do so through trustworthy links. Don’t click on links in unsolicited emails nor on random websites.
AOL laid off most of their postmaster team. This is going to have a significant impact on sender support provided by AOL. The background chatter I’m hearing indicates that there is likely to be response delays of days to weeks for support tickets.
Pivotal Veracity was acquired by Unica, a marketing software company. Industry buzz says that PV will be run as a subsidiary and maintain their independent customer base.
Spamhaus launched a new website, which includes a link for a domain based URI blocklist. There’s not much information available about this new blocklist, but it’s likely to function similar to SURBL and URIBL.
The lethic botnet was penetrated and disabled. Dark Market, one of the large credit card number trading sites, was taken down and the proprietor arrested.

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How do unengaged recipients hurt delivery?

In the comments Ulrik asks: “How can unengaged recipients hurt delivery if they aren’t complaining? What feedback mechanism is there to hurt the the delivery rate besides that?”
There are a number of things that ISPs are monitoring besides complaint rates, although they are being cautious about revealing what and how they are measuring things. I expect that ISPs are measuring things like:

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AOL layoffs and postmaster changes

As most of you probably know, AOL went through a serious round of layoffs yesterday. Unlike previous layoffs this one did hit the postmaster team pretty hard. Anna posted this morning that she was the only non-programming member of the postmaster team left in the US. This means there are a number of experienced folks looking for work with experience managing delivery for a large outfit. More info is on her blog.
While I don’t have any firm data, I expect that this is going to significantly affect the support that senders see from AOL. I know many of us have held up AOL as the poster child for how ISPs should interact with senders. That era is drawing to a close.
These layoffs come as AOL has migrated to a new mail system and a lot of senders are seeing new and different error messages. I do believe the folks handling the mail system and the migration are still there and are feverishly working to resolve problems caused by the migration. Right now things are in flux and senders should probably expect delays in getting support from AOL for delivery problems.
UPDATE: Matt Vernhout has a list of suggestions for how to deal with AOL delivery issues.

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Click-wrap licenses again

Earlier this week ARS Technica reported on a ruling from the Missouri Court of Appeals stating that terms and conditions are enforceable even if the users are not forced to visit the T&C pages. Judge Rahmeyer, one of the panel members, did point out that the term in question, under what state laws the agreement would be enforced, was not an unreasonable request. She “do[es] not want [their] opinion to indicate that consumers assent to any buried term that a website may provide simply by using the website or clicking ‘I agree.'”
What does this have to do with email? Well, it means that reasonable terms in the agreements may still be binding even if the user does not read the full terms of the opt in before submitting an email address. In practical terms, though, there’s very little that has changed. Hiding grants of permission deep in a terms document has long been a sneaky trick practiced by spammers and list sellers. Legitimate companies already make terms clear so that users know what type of and how much mail to expect by signing up to a list. They also know that the legal technicalities of permission are not as important as meeting the recipients expectations.

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Keep subscribers happy

Mark Brownlow writes about engagement. “…the people we really need to keep happy are the subscribers.” Go read the whole thing.

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FBI indicts 19 for internet related fraud

A federal grand jury in Dallas returned an indictment this week charging 19 individuals with conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud. 15 of the defendants are charged with email fraud. All in all, these defendants are accused of defrauding various companies, from telcos to web developers, of $15,000,000.

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Important notification spammers break the law

I’m currently being inundated at multiple address with spam advertising spamming services. Most of these notices have the subject line: IMPORTANT NOTIFICATION. The text includes:

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