Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

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Home 29 Apr 2007 Oklahoma Spammer Fighter Loses Even Worse Email Last December I wrote about Mark Mumma, who runs a small web hosting company in Oklahoma City and his battle with Omega World Travel a/k/a cruise.com. Mumma lost his CAN SPAM suit agains them in December, but Omega's countersuit for defamation went to trial last week, and I hear that the jury awarded Omega $2.5 million in damages, which Mumma is not likely to be able to pay. This may be painted in some circles as a huge defeat for anti-spam activists, but it's not. Mumma has been what one might call an intemperate litigant, as most impressively documented in an interview with Ken Magill. Press reports say that Omega would have settled with Mumma for an apology and no money, which considering Mumma's string of losses was a pretty good offer. But he didn't. There are plenty of real anti-spam lawsuits going on, with real charges of behavior that is actually prohibited by law. A good example is the case that Project Honeypot filed last week against spammers who'd scraped addresses off their honeypot web pages. I look forward to following its progress. Update: Read Robert Braver's comment on this message which clarifies the sequence of suits. Omega sued first in response to threats from Mumma, but the outcome is indeed a train wreck. posted at: 23:01 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/mumma2.trackback Better not have any of these e-mail addresses Email From a recent mailing from Performics (soon to be part of Google) about an affiliate program I just added to my account: One important point about your ongoing communications with Performics. We use an industry-leading email communications platform that has some stringent delivery requirements. Unfortunately the system does not recognize some common prefixes. ... List of undeliverable email prefixes: abuse@, admin@, alerts@, blacklist@, blackhole, bulkmail@, contact@, devnull@, domain@, domreg@, domtech@, email@, ftp@, help@, hostmaster@, hr@, info@, information@, it@, jobs@, mailer-daemon@, maps@, marketing@, news@, noc@, nospam@, postmaster@, privacy@, rbl@, remarks@, root@, route@, sales@, security@, spam@, spamtrap@, support@, techsupport@, test@, usenet@, uucp@, webmaster@, webteam@, www@ posted at: 22:13 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/notaddrs.trackback 18 Apr 2007 ICANN to Registerfly: we really REALLY mean it this time ICANN ICANN's web site has a press release saying that the were granted a temporary restraining order on Monday requiring that Registerfly cough up all the info on their registrants, or else. My assumption all along has been that the reason that Registerfly hasn't provided full info is because they don't have it. ICANN agrees that they got partial data last month, and it's hard to imagine a reason that Registerfly would have given them some of the data but deliberately held back the rest. I guess we'll know soon enough. By the way, I hear that ICANN plans to implement their registrar escrow policy, the one that's been in the contracts since 2000, pretty soon. posted at: 17:15 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/rforelse.trackback 06 Apr 2007 Splitting the root -- it's too late ICANN One of the consistent chants we've always heard from ICANN is that there has to be a single DNS root, so everyone sees the same set of names on the net, a sentiment with which I agree. Unfortunately, I discovered at this week's ICANN meeting that due to ICANN's inaction, it's already too late. See more ... posted at: 08:41 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/rootsplit.trackback

Topics Copyright Law - 9 Email - 136 ICANN - 69 Money - 8 My other sites Who is this guy? Airline ticket info Taughannock Networks Other blogs Spam resource (Al Iverson) The Spam Diaries (Ed Falk) Word to the Wise (Laura Atkins) Related sites IRTF Anti-Spam Research Group Network Abuse Clearinghouse Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail

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