OptInRealBig Wins Restraining Order On SpamCop

arikb writes "Some online newspapers are reporting that the infamous Scott Richter and his company OptInRealBig won a temporary restraining order against SpamCop. The TRO prevents SpamCop from sending complaints about OIRB to their provider or removing email addresses from the complaints it receives which regard OIRB. I think we will rue this day for years to come." Update: 05/12 16:43 GMT by T : The Ultimate Fartkno writes "HillsCap, a fed-up SpamCop user, is now organizing a class-action lawsuit to be brought against Richter and Opt-In. At least 1,000 signatures are needed, so tell your friends!"

Comments

Chicken Little

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we will rue this day for years to come.

Spare us the drama. No, we won't rue this day for years to come. It's a temporary restraining order that expires on May 20th. That's next week. If you blink, you'll miss it. Also, note this from TFA:

IronPort did not file an opposition to OptIn's motion for a TRO, which OptIn filed May 4. The court reviewed the papers and issued its ruling on OptIn's motion May 10 without a hearing. IronPort has not yet filed an answer to OptIn's original complaint.

Ironport owns Spamcop, for those who don't know. So where's the problem? The sky is not falling. Someone show the judge the Daily Show clip of Richter, his "high volume email deployment", and how he was made a fool. I'll reply if I find the link.

Re:Chicken Little

[merlin_jim]

Just a thought; would this then require OIRB to positively identify which mass e-mail campaigns are theirs, so that SpamCop can comply with the injunction?

I mean in order to comply, OIRB would have to provide identifying characteristics of their e-mails, right? Isn't that just what all the spam filter guys have been looking for? Identifying characteristics... yeah I know, easy to change next week, but in the meantime they'll have a definitive list, giving them a clue into this week's state of the art in spam obfuscation...

Re:Chicken Little

[thewldisntenuff]

http://dnsbl.net.au/files/show.wmv
http://www.ian ai.net/jokes/DailyShow.ScottRichter. wmv
http://www.badmonkey.ca/files/show.wmv

Links to the Scott Richter clip!

Maybe this will fix my crappy karma....May the Slashdot Effect Begin!!!!

-thewldisntenuff

Re:Chicken Little

[Liselle]

I mean in order to comply, OIRB would have to provide identifying characteristics of their e-mails, right? Isn't that just what all the spam filter guys have been looking for?

You only have to look as far as your inbox. True to its name, if you sign up (heh) for OptInRealBig spam, you can be assured you'll get lots more spam from OIRB's "partners".

I think you answered yourself. Sure, it would help for a week, but then the method would become ineffective, and we'd be stuck with it. Useless, and with more overhead to boot. No, Scott Richter just needs to be shut down, period. You can't kill all of the cockroaches, but you can kill the big ones that can't run fast, and like to give TV interviews.

Re:Chicken Little

[bencc99]

another mirror

Re:Chicken Little

[johnnyb]

First, I know nothing of OIRB specifically. However, please don't assume that all email marketing companies are spammers. It just isn't true. I work for a company that does email marketing, and our server has had the same IP address for over a year, and all of our emails come from the same domain, with clear opt-out instructions (in addition, you had to have opted in directly to have received it to begin with).

There are some of us companies who actually do send legitimate email where the recipients are trying _to_ receive the message rather than trying to block us. I have personally walked many people through turning down their anti-spam software to make sure our messages get through to their system.

Anyway, I think it would be wise to be sure that we remember that not all commercial marketing email is bad, or else I'll wake up one day and half.com will no longer be sending me email updates about which books I want have come in at the price I specified (which is in fact the most effective form of email marketing).

Follow-up

[Anonymous Coward]

Video. Wonder how long that poor schmuck's server will last, but it's not on the Comedy Central page for the Daily Show that I can see.

Re:Follow-up

[puppet10]

It is on Comedy Central its just hidden a bit (and in Real format)-- Daily Show: Corddry - Email Trouble

How's this happening, again?

[matth]

Let me make sure I have this straight... who's got a gun to the mailserver administrator's head saying "You must use spamcop to filter your mail"? No one.. ok that's what I thought. So how exactly does OIRB even have a case here? Spamcop is running a service, which somtimes blocks OIRB, they are forcing everyone and their mother who runs a mail server to use them (spamcop)... so why did this even go through? It's not spamcop's fault.. it's the mailserver admin's fault the mail is being blocked. And, unless I'm wrong, mailservers are privately owned pieces of machinery and I have every right to say "Sorry, you can't come trampling on my equipment right now", to someone. So while OIRB might not like it, my mail server is private property.

Isn't this like hireing Diebold to secure your house, and then having someone (say Jehovah's Witnesses) complain and file a suit against Diebold because they can no longer come up to your house and just enter?

I know I know.. I'm stretching the example a bit... but JW can 'technically' come up to my house knock and I can talk to them if I wish. I can also turn them away.. it's MY house.. MY property. I install a third party system which does something or other to keep them away... how's this diebold's problem? or mine for that matter?

Re:How's this happening, again?

[Liselle]

Weird, I don't usually see analogies on Slashdot that make sense. /applause

But anyway, that's only one aspect of it. Richter is also going after them for forwarding complaints to OIRB's ISP instead of the company directly. It's not that people use their blacklists (although that's part of it), it's that SpamCop is actively trying to get ISPs to shut him down. Presumably for a violation of TOS or whatnot. Richter claims that it's unlawfully costing him business. I know, I know, he's full of #$@$, I am just stating the facts. :P

Re:How's this happening, again?

[ScouseMouse]

Whether or not Spamming is legal is not actually the point. Any private individual has the right to hold opinions on the activities of another person or company.

The scummers, erm, spammers, are using the argument that blocking these emails is costing them business.

I would use the counter argument, that people (And this includes ISP's) choose *not* to recieve these emails because they are costing them time and money, and the spammers are not recompensing them.

You may have the right to show me advertising, but you dont have the right to make me pay for you to do it. One of the reasons i dumped my old Dial up account is the minute or so wait while i downloaded scum.. erm.. spam... erm... marketing emails during which time the clock was ticking, but i coudnt use my internet connection.

There are still quite a number of places in the world where people still pay for internet by the minute. (Not me any more fortunately)

So, if any of your spammers are out there reading this message, Feel free to try to sue me for accusing you of the following: you are BOTTOM SUCKING LEECHES who survive by MAKING EVERYONES INTERNET CONNECTIONS THAT MORE UNPLEASANT TO USE. I not only hoping you loose the case against SPAMCOP, AOS, MICROSOFT et al, i hope they NAIL YOUR SCUMMY LITTLE COMPANIES TO THE WALL, and prove to everyone just what MORONIC IDIOTS you are in practicing this BARELY LEGAL "marketing" activity that would be BANNED IN VIRTUALLY ANY OTHER MEDIA.

Hmm, theraputic, must do that more often :-)

The Root of Spam

[ca23e]

These companies will continue to use whatever legal tactics they can so long as the response rate to their spam makes it profitable to run their business.

While I'm all for the further development of spam filters and blocking spammers, our inboxes will not be free of it till people stop BUYING from their advertisements.

Re:The Root of Spam

[smartin]

While I'm all for the further development of spam filters and blocking spammers, our inboxes will not be free of it till people stop BUYING from their advertisements.

People say this all the time, but obviously it is an unworkable solution. What really needs to be done is to penalize companies that use the services of spammers. Clearly in order for spam to be effective the company selling the product must be accessible. The law, (and/or those practicing vigilante justice) need to insure that those trying to use spam pay more than they make from it. Once it becomes impractical to use spammers, the spammers will go out of business, fall into deal depression and hopefully take their own lives.

Re:The Root of Spam

[FFFish]

And therein lies the problem: evolution simply isn't working on the dolts who purchase from spam advertisers.

We need to up the ante.

As I said before he is still going to win

[codepunk]

Eveyone can thank the can spam act for this but he is still going to win his suits. As long as he is fully following the federal can spam act rules he is on strong legal grounds. Yes it may suck but according to the law he may be doing absolutely nothing wrong.

Re:As I said before he is still going to win

[That's Unpossible!]

As long as he is fully following the federal can spam act rules he is on strong legal grounds.

To continue spamming, maybe. But how is he on strong legal grounds to force a company to stop classifying his email as "unwanted," when that is exactly what spamcop does. They take complaints, record them, munge them, and pass them on to service providers.

CAN-SPAM says "you can spam, if you do it this way, and you won't be sued or thrown in jail." But it doesn't say other people can't filter you, file complaints against you to your ISP, etc.

This is retarded.

Anti-Spammers? No

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't help by mention this part about Scott, after he complete defends himself from being considered a 'spammer', yet the people who go against him are.....

Scott: "Well, these anti-spammers-"

DailyShow: "Don't you mean anti-high-volume-email-deployment?"

Scott: "What?!??....that just sounds stupid, they're anti-spammers"

Wrong Approaches

[jenohn]

We are approaching this wrongly in so many ways.

There are legal methods which will fail because there is already precedence with SPAM grocery mailers, etc. There are also smart lawyers working (for high dollars) for the spammers who can get cluelesss judges to support the SPAM purveyors.

There are firewall/spam blocker methods that will continue to fail as spammers learn the tricks to route around them. This is the old hacker/security expert game. Build a better lock/block and it will soon be cracked/by-passed. The cycle is repeated ad nauseum.

The only real method of fixing this is to charge for e-mail. Once the spammers have to pay then their rate of return (ROI) will decrease so that it is no longer a viable business model.

Yes, this means we will pay for e-mail. I hate the idea as much as you, but I cannot see a working solution in any other method.

Re:Wrong Approaches

[Liselle]

This is the greatest checklist ever made. I owe the creator a donut and a big cup of coffee.
--

The parent post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.

Re:Wrong Approaches

[Steve B]

How does nonsense like this get modded up as "Insightful"?

There are two possible rules: "You must pay to send e-mail" or "You may not spam". If you can enforce the former, you can enforce the latter. If you cannot enforce the latter, you also cannot enforce the former. Thus, if you're going to make a rule, it ought to be the latter (which impacts only abusers) rather than the former (which impacts everybody).

This really is no big deal

[MrByte420]

These arguments Richter is bringing up have had their showing in courts before. Richter complains that spam cop is interferring with his business. Spam Cop is doing no such thing. Spam Cop is not forced upon anyone. Spam Cop has given out their negative opinion about something and the target is just trying to shut them up.

Suppose I create a website which rates hardware for PCs and I decide that such in such Video Card really fucking blows big chunks. This is akin to the manufacter trying to argue that I am interfering with his business because I'm telling everyone his product sucks - as long as I'm not being intentionaly libelous, I would think I'd be 1st amendment protected.

Remeber that lawsuit last year from that copany that magiccaly sprung in Flordia just to flie a suit and disappear? That blew over - Spamhaus is still around and this will too.

Re:Frivolous lawsuits

[Shimbo]

Or the judge who issued it?

It seems entirely reasonable to me, in the first instance, to rule in favour of the spammer.

Spammer: these guys are interfering with my business.
Spamcop: No, we're not.
Judge: Well, just lay off them a bit, while I think about it.

What you can do to help

[Mr. Darl McBride]

If you have any unwanted offers from "Opt In Real Big" (the most recent major campaign was the "Tail Wagging Offers" thing), save those and get ready to offer them up to Ironport as evidence.

Opt In Real Big claims to be an opt-in only company. However, they operate through third parties with no checks in place to ensure the third parties are using opt-in lists, paying those parties based on how many people click their links. Making it a <fingerquote> policy </fingerquote> gives them plausible deniability up until people start laying down evidence that they're full of shit.

"Under the table" deal

[Woogiemonger]

I bet they bribed the judge with a penis enlargement pill.

Throttling

[Sly Mongoose]

The only way to eliminate SPAM is to make it unprofitable. Since the world is full of fools, we can't count on them to just not respond to SPAM so we need to reduce the numbers of SPAM messages sent by the spammers.

We need some sort of real-time, content-driven connection throttling on the mail servers of the world, so as to reduce the number of SPAM that can be sent in any given time. The inbound mail can be analysed on-the-fly and if the word pen1s or vi@gara is detected, throttle the connection so that mail takes 60 seconds to send.

Throttling will only affect mass mailings. Who cares if their legitimate mail about V.I.C.O.D.I.N is delayed by 60 seconds? And there will be no false-positive difficulties because all mail will eventually get delivered. But bulk-mailers will discover that they can send far fewer SPAM in a day, which drops their response rate and their profitability. Hopefully to the point where they can't sustain their business any more.

Read the Article

[hburch]

Heck, read the summary. The injuction and the suit involves sending e-mail to ISPs (presumably, OIRB's) and deleting e-mail addresses from complaints. This suit does not deal with listing OIRB as a domain that you may want to block.

"We're not going after IronPort because of their blocking. We're going after IronPort for the harassment," [OIRB's Scott Richter] said. "We're going to go after many antispam groups."

I think they are going after because of their blocking, but their suit does not complain about the blocking. They are going after anonymous e-mail complaints and sending e-mail to the ISP. Your argument does not address the issue at hand.

Possible class-action suit against Scotty

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

FYI-

HillsCap (who I think is an admin at an ISP) has gone on the warpath against Scott Richter. See this thread in SpamCop's forums...

http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showto pi c=1456

He's saved up a few *million* emails from Scotty and he has contacts with some interestingly acronymed agencies, if you get my drift. If the right people get on board with this, we just might be able to raze Opt-In and sow the ground with salt after it's gone.

No, not necessarily

[Croaker]

according to the law he may be doing absolutely nothing wrong.

Right, but that does not automatically mean that SpamCop is doing anything wrong. The Can Spam act is essentially irrelevant here, because the issue isn't whether spamming is legal, but whether spamming was in breach of the contract with the spammer's ISP. The issue is that SpamCop is ratting out the spammer to his ISP for spamming, and that ISP pulls the spammer's plug. If the ISP has written into its contract with the spammer "no spamming" and he/she/it spams, then that is totally legal. The argument here that SpamCop is interfering with the spammer's business unjustly (which most of us think it isn't). The little razzle-dazzle about "we're complying with the can spam act!" whine by the spammer is irrelevant.

As an analogy: If we're neighbors in an apartment building that forbids pets, and I ratted you out to the landlord because you had a few cats, you won't be getting into trouble with thelandlord because owning cats is illegal... you'll be getting into trouble with the landlord because you've violated your lease.

What the spammer is trying to say here is that under the Can Spam Act, you cannot go directly to the ISP with complaints. You must complain to him first. IANAL, but that sounds like bullshit. If SpamCop was out of the picture and I complained to the ISP directly myself, would I get sued? I don't believe there's any way you could restrain my right of free speech to inform the ISP that his client is in breach of his contract. I also don;t think the ISP would be required to give up my identity to the spammer. As the article said, there isn't a legal requirement to be faced with your accusers in cases such as this.

SpamCop.*net*

[mcbridematt]

The SpamCop we are talking about here is not spamcop.com (which this /. article links to), it is spamcop.net.

Hmm, what idiot provides this guys bandwidth?

OptIn's contact info

[raider_red]

From the optinrealbig.com web site:

Contact us via e-mail: info@optinbig.com
or phone: (303) 464-8164

OptInRealBig.com, LLC
1333 W 120th Ave Suite 101
Westminster, CO 80234

I think we should all give them a call or send them a friendly letter letting them know what we think of their "service".

Re:OptIn's contact info

[sirgoran]

Ummm...

They have a website (www.optinbig.com).

Are we forgetting the slashdot effect?

Shouldn't we all look to see if his servers can handle the load?

-Goran

This is stupid

[Paulrothrock]

How is this different from OIRB suing me when I delete one of their spams? SpamCop is selling a service that deletes it for me so I don't have to deal with it.

Re:Yahoo Does alright with filtering spam

[Isofarro]

The problem as stated by the defendant is that SpamCop is hiding the identity of the complaining user and then complaining to the defendants ISP to get them disconnected. This leaves the no option to remeday the situation and they are not addressed directly.

And the problem is non-existant. Spamcop replaces the real email address with a randomly generated prefix - a temporary email address - thereby protecting the client. ISPs can reply to that email address which returns a response back to the original complainant. So what's stopping him from doing that - nothing! (Except the volume of complaints - but then that's his fault for not running a proper confirmed opt-in approach).

And it does work. I have replies from ISPs confirming removal of spammers / disinfection of mail relay trojans - they have no problem replying to the email address as created by Spamcop.

I reiterate

[FU_Fish]

I reiterate from the previous story. If OptInRealBig is a legitimate opt-in e-mail marketing service, then why don't they have a place anywhere on their website to opt-in?