Spammer sues spammed
The tables are turned
In an unusual turn of events, a US company accused of sending large volumes of unsolicited email has filed a lawsuit against a man who reported their actions to his ISP.
New Hampshire firm Atriks alleges that, by branding the firm and its staff as spammers, and reporting the firm's 'spamming' actions to his ISP, Jay Stuler caused financial harm to the firm and caused it to lose contracts.
In the court filing, Atriks states that: "The activities of Atriks ... meet the requirements of the Can-Spam Act."
SpamHaus.org disagrees, however - listing Atriks and its CEO Brian Haberstroh on its register of known spam operations (ROKSO) and stating, 'The VirtualMDA system appears to violate the recent CAN-SPAM law by falsifying the transmission path, i.e. there is no trace of the original Atriks/Sendmails server (where the e-mail originates) showing in the headers, only the IP address of the victim running their software. This is all done, they admit, to try and sneak past spam filters.'
Stuler, who believes the lawsuit is a case of sour grapes, has appealed for financial assistance in fighting his case and has set up a PayPal account for donations to his legal fees.
19 January 2005
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