Vonage Beats CAN-SPAM Lawsuit
Written by Sue Walsh on July 5, 2010
VOIP provider Vonage has won a startling court victory when a California judge threw out a lawsuit alleging CAN-SPAM violations saying that deliberately designing emails to bypass spam filters is not illegal.
The suit was filed by the LA County DA’s office after many people complained about getting spam messages from the company with from lines that indicated that they had come from domains that had nothing to do with Vonage. The marketing agent working for the company sent the emails from a list of mostly nonsensical domains registered to them:
- superhugeterm.com
- formycompanysite.com
- ursunrchcntr.com
- urgrtquirkz.com
- countryfolkgospel.com
- lowdirectsme.com
- yearnfrmore.com
- openwrldkidz.com
- ourgossipfrom.com
- specialvrguide.com
- struggletailssite.com
Surprisingly, Justice Ming Chin ruled that the accusations of the spam mails being deliberately misleading were not true:
“We find,” found Justice Ming Chin, “that a single e-mail with an accurate and traceable domain name neither contains nor is accompanied by ‘misrepresented … header information’ … merely because its domain name … is ‘random,’ ‘varied,’ ‘garbled’ and ‘nonsensical’ when viewed in conjunction with domain names used in other e-mails. An e-mail with an accurate and traceable domain name makes no affirmative representation or statement of fact that is false.”
Obviously Vonage was doing everything they could to prevent their spam from being caught in spam filters, including sending it from ridiculous, nonsensical domains in order to hide, and sadly, it’s all perfectly legal.
How do you feel about the judge’s ruling? Do you agree, or do you think this loophole in the law needs to be closed?
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We don’t have all the details here, but it sounds like these emails are bulk and unsolicited, and therefore spam. The fact that they were using ‘random’ domains adds weight to the idea that Vonage were trying to circumvent spam filters which is at the very least unethical.
But don’t we all tell users NOT to open email from unknown senders?
If they were registering multiple domain names for the purpose of sending spam, I wondering what else they were doing, rotating IP address and spreading the send across a variety of subnets perhaps.
Smells like a classic snowshoe operation and Vonage should be ashamed, they were evidently not behaving with any integrity.