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Newbie/Basic Questions

Initiating legal actions

Author: T.Johnson (4 Feb 05 1:21pm)

Hi there,

Does anyone have experience or contacts with experience of taking legal actions against spammers and their ISPs? Especially on behalf of Canadian businesses?

While we take steps to prevent our email addresses being harvested from our website, it appears that viruses on customer's computers are getting and using our addresses by harvesting their Outlook address books etc, and then passing those addresses around. One way to prevent this might be to interface PHP into RT or some other customer request tracking system so that each customer is issued with a unique address, and spam sent to that address can then be traced. Is this possible, and has anyone implemented PHP this way? It would also have the advantage of being impossible for spammers to avoid because the MX server would still be the company's real MX.

Also, I see in the example PHP site terms that the value of an email address is set at $50. Can we set this higher, thereby making lawsuits more easily self-funding? The cost of renaming an existing role account that is being spammed out of existence can run into thousands of dollars in reprinted stationary alone, so surely a higher price is justified?

Spammers do untold damage to my business by making it ever harder to deliver documents to legitimate customers online...Hotmail being especially bad for false positives despite our implementing SPF - ironically, because we only send messages per order, not to a mailing list, we don't qualify under their 'bulk sender' whitelist program! I would love to start recouping those costs and then get back to focusing on improving systems that address real customer service issues.

Re: Initiating legal actions

Author: B.Dahl (4 Feb 05 2:36pm)

Thanks for participation in the project!

It sounds as though spammers have posed particular challenges for your business. The model terms sets the value of email address at $50 for the primary reason that courts would not uphold a standard value of an email address as being much higher. In order for a court to uphold a "liquidated damages" clause, which is what the $50 value is, in a contract, the agreed upon value (in this case $50) must be not be so extreme as to present a punishment for a breach of contract. In discussions with many lawyers, we came to the conclusion that $50 would be a reasonable value of the secrecy of emails that have a high probability of being upheld by a court.

While we encourage you to seek you own legal counsel, there may be other causes of action available to you that have nothing to do with the violation of security of particular email addresses. It appears based on your representations that there may be a claim for, among other things, tortious interference in your business. In such a case there may be an opportunity to recover actual and consequential damages. If spammers are having such a large impact on your business, these other avenues may be more appropriate in getting a fair level of compensation for the harm that they are doing to your websites. In such a case, we may be able to assist you in tracking potential defendants down.

Thank you again for your participation.

Post Edited (4 Feb 05 1:48pm)

Re: Initiating legal actions

Author: T.Johnson (8 Feb 05 2:39pm)

Given that the main problem we face is the increasing difficulty of getting legitimate order fulfilments through to customers who use Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. because of collateral damage from spam filters, it would be unfair to sue the ISPs, but difficult to press a case against spam senders in general....