A Utah court recently ruled in a CAN SPAM case Zoobuh vs. Better Broadcasting et al. The decision has two interesting aspects. The spammer used proxy registrations to hide the WHOIS contact information on the return addresses, which the court declared was a CAN SPAM violation, the first time a... Continue reading

According to a BBC report, the United Kingdom Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) will be levying large fines on mobil phone text spammers. In March the ICO started asking consumers to report unwanted calls, texts, and emails, and was deluged with over 30,000 complaints. After sifting through them, they identified bulk... Continue reading

Brian McDaid was a chiropractor who ran an affiliate spam scheme in 2005-2006 for Hoodia and other weight loss nostrums. He called his company Sili Neutraceuticals. In 2007, the FTC charged that he falsely advertised that Hoodia caused rapid weight loss. In 2008, they got a $2 million judgement against... Continue reading

We need not go into how frequently abuse happens on the Internet. Daily news reports in the popular press and media speak to that, and the ubiquity of the problem cannot be overstated. Beside the obvious criminal element involved in spamming, hacking and other Inter­net abuse, there remain, unfortunately, some marketers from name-brand companies who engage in poor practices. Organizations like the Messaging Anti-abuse Working Group (MAAWG.org) have worked very hard to develop Best Common Practices documents, many based upon the fine work undertaken by the Canadian Task Force on Spam. We encourage you to review them as you proceed in this process and the work ahead of you. Ivor Tossell perhaps said it best in his article recently published in the Globe and Mail: “Providing real content to real customers with whom you’ve got a real relationship is the opposite of spam” CAUCE generally supports the draft regulations. Our goal, which we believe you share, is that the recipient of electronic communications be protected from abuse, and when it occurs, be able to stop it, and report it easily and without technical skills beyond those of ordinary Internet users. We must respect and preserve the ability for senders of commercial messaging to comply with the law and the regulations; we also think that avoiding trivial or technical ‘gotcha’ viola­tions is fundamental to an effective and fair anti-spam régime in Canada. That said, we anticipate some commentary will propose changes that open dangerous loopholes that will be quickly exploited by Internet abusers. Marketers are not the main reason people are on the Internet; business use of the net still lags far behind what is most popular. The sites that individuals most often visit are social networks and other forms of personal, one-to-one interactions with friends and family, first and foremost. Continue reading

Four years ago a bulk mailer called e360 sued the Spamhaus Project for a broad range of alleged evils interfereing with e360's allegedly highly successful email marketing business, which most of the rest of us considered to be spamming to sell junk. Due to a variety of unfortunate legal moves... Continue reading

For many years, the Cornell Legal Information Institute (LII) has been a premier source of reference information about laws in the US and elsewhere. One day last year, LII director Tom Bruce and CAUCE president John Levine were talking over breakfast, and noted that there was no authoritative online source... Continue reading

It's been a very bad month for ESPs, companies that handle bulk mailings for their clients. Several of them have had internal security breaches, leaking client information, client mailing lists, or both. Many have also seen clients compromised, with the compromised credentials used to send spam. The sequence of events... Continue reading

All too predictably, after the recent earthquake in Canterbury, New Zealand, spammers are taking advantage of people's natural kind inclinations and sending out spam for fake earthquake relief organizations. If you do want to send something, send it through one of the organizations below, which are known to be genuine:... Continue reading

CAUCE has never been a fan of the CAN SPAM act, which we consider to be far too weak. But as if that weren't bad enough, in the Ninth Circuit in the western US, some poorly considered legal cases have made it impossible for anyone even to get a CAN... Continue reading