Will 2006 be the year we tame spam or is this just wishful thinking?

Recently a US court imposed an $11.2bn fine on a Florida-based spammer. Internet service provider CIS Internet Services sued James McCalla for sending more than 28 million spam emails that used the CIS domain. A bit of a pyrrhic victory, one would have thought, as McCalla is unlikely to pay the fine and the space vacated by him will be filled by someone else soon enough.

Meanwhile in the UK, showing a degree of initiative and perseverance, Nigel Roberts sued Media Logistics (UK) for sending spam about fax broadcasting and contract car hire to his personal email account. Media Logistics filed an acknowledgement of the claim at Colchester County Court but did not defend it and a judge ruled in favour of Roberts. In an out-of-court agreement Media Logistics agreed to pay Roberts damages of £270 plus his £30 filing fee.

The UK case is likely to have more impact as it sets a precedent here. Of course it will only apply to unsolicited emails sent by identifiable UK businesses, who will have to carefully consider whether or not the benefits of sending unsolicited emails will be outweighed by the odd £270 claim.

I can see a cottage industry springing up. You send me an unsolicited email and I’ll send you an invoice for £270. Not bad for five minutes work.

In another case – this time Bernuth Lines v High Seas Shipping, decided on 21 December 2005 – an English court rejected a last-minute challenge by Bernuth Lines against an arbitration ruling. What is interesting about this case is that the lawyers for High Seas initially used a generic info@... e-mail address, published by Bernuth Lines, for all their initial communications.

Bernuth, for whatever reason, ignored these emails, resulting in the dispute being referred to arbitration without its participation. Once the award was given, High Seas then decided to serve it by post, resulting in the proceedings to set the award aside.

Unfortunately for Bernuth, the judge decided that service of notice by email is permitted by the Arbitration Act and therefore it was Bernuth’s fault for not checking its emails.

The moral of this story is don’t publicise an email address in directories and on your web site if you don’t intend acting on the emails you then receive. Fine tuning your anti-spam rules and checking quarantine folders will be essential if you want to stay on the right side of the law.

Sadly the spam problem is not going to go away. Why? Well, the government failed completely when it implemented the directive prohibiting unsolicited emails, by applying the regulations to personal email addresses only. So, spammers can target businesses with impunity.