Then, instead of whining around on the internet writing blogposts and making money off those banner ads, the poster should have contacted local law enforcement authorities.
I don't see why she should defame GoDaddy. If I had a server there, and I was accused of sending spam, I would have the right to know which address considered my email as spam (and determine for myself whether the user subscribed to my services or not).
So hypothetically speaking you'd be OK with receiving a message from a hosting provider you did business with accusing you of spamming an unspecified person at an unspecified e-mail address and threatening to terminate your account, leaving you with no way of knowing what actually happened?
Seems to me that GoDaddy did the right thing. The texts were unsolicited and based on some of the claims in the story, weren't actually targeted at voters. Not sure why this is considered news, although the way I read the title, GoDaddy did a bad thing. Perhaps texts should be changed to spam.
I think "spam" in the sense of "creative advertising" like posting on Craigslist, posting to at least quasi-relevant mailing lists, etc is fine. Spam in the sense of unsolicited email and posting to unrelated sites (e.g. teenwag on news.yc) is absolutely evil and not OK. There's a fine line between evil spam and creative advertising, but as Justice Potter Stewart said in Miller v. California: "I know it when I see it".
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, No property or person is being harmed with spam. Time is wasted, yes. But no crime is being committed in the normal sense of the word. To compare spam to thievery, blackmail and extortion (where their is a removal of property of threats to a person) is not a very good analogy and I think taking things a bit too far. It's closer to aggresively handing out flyers on the street and possibly a case of harrassment.
Sure, but there was no warning, no notification of violation, and (if what they say is true) an erroneous categorization of being "spam."
In short, incredibly poor customer service (completely absent) and disrespectful to the user.
Personally, I think it's a shame, given the breadth of other content on Blogger, that this would be killed without recourse.
Imagine if this were your gmail account and you had a politically charged email :). Different terms of service, but people expect the same terms from the same company.
This raises what's really the ultimate question, which is whether and how much individuals should be made to suffer so that advertisers can send spam. Certainly the recipients are not responsible for the advertisers' decisions to spam, or more charitably, to blur the lines. Yet it's individuals who pay, in this case literally, for the advertisers' privilege of spamming them. It's extremely fucked.
That's a good point. An unsolicited advertisement for something could be considered illegal according to CAN-SPAM but if the individual has a relationship with that company than an email like the one the sent to Sumit is legal. It could likely be argued that visiting a site could be considered establishing a relationship.
That's just a guess on my part. I'd love to hear from someone better versed on the law about the legality of that email.
I wonder if there is a defamation/libel type of lawsuit here.
If that would ever fly, I want to take action against mail servers that tell me my mail is "spam" when it clearly isn't and was double opted-in by their users :-D
It is not Spam per se if it is relevant - and clearly in this case someone has gone to some trouble to identify relevant recipients for a specific email. Where is the "crime" in the commercial aspect - we are all in business one way or another? I do think you are being too sensitive. If you do not want to receive emails from users of HN then perhaps you should not make your address available.
> Marketing for a service you have registered is not spam
From a legal standpoint, this is broadly true, but I'd say from a user's perspective, this is only very narrowly true.
For example, if I'm receiving an advertisement for a product that I "freely" trialed but subsequently rejected, I perceive it as spam.
Reputable companies provide an "unsubscribe" feature that actually works, but it's impossible to determine a priori which companies those are, and, more importantly, if they'll still be that way when that first e-mail arrives.
Really, the most trustworthy behavior would be to assume I'm consenting to precisely one follow-up email regarding my free trial, rather than an open-ended subscription. Until that's either industry standard or regulated (in a way where individuals can easily recover money damages), then I'm still using disposables at first contact.
> More and more companies deny registration from Disposable Email Addresses. Because these users are worthless.
Encountering a company like that, I assume they believe the second assertion to be true because the sole value of the users is as advertising eyeballs due to the product trial itself demonstrating no value. In that case, I don't bother.
I will, however, usually make at least a modest effort to try a few non-Mailinator disposables.
Although Mailinator has alternate domains, they've made themselves very easy to block, because a simple DNS query reveals the MX to be mail.mailinator.com. Just one more level of obfuscation (e.g. making the MX for streetwisemail.com be mail.streetwisemail.com and just have the same IP as mail.mailinator.com) strikes me as a good Pareto-principled step.
You can defame a corporation, in which case there’s no one to take offense. As for spam: look up the long list of rules in the CAN-SPAM act, for example.
In usual Slashdot style, the headline there is a tad misleading, but the ruling comes down to the fact that flooding someone's inbox violates the computer fraud and abuse act.
At that point, you're boxed in. You're already on a list. Begging and hoping when your revenue and relationships are under attack is not an option.
Filing for injunctive relief isn't a threat. It's legal action. Unlike spammers, we could easily demonstrate our legitimacy and best practices, etc. They would be compelled to remove us and not retaliate if they are a legit business and care about the integrity of their service for their own reputation and customers.
If, however, that does not describe them, then the outcome would seem to be bleak in any case.
> Would you consider it spam if someone manually went to a site, found their contact information, and sent them an email by hand? It appears to fit the same definition as "unsolicited", and yet, that is one of the purposes of a business placing their email address on their website.
That depends. Clearly a business selling computers that posts its email address on its website does want to receive emails from people who want to buy computers. They maybe even want to receive emails from people selling computers. What they likely don’t want are emails from people selling cars.
Someone running a blog on X with an email address on the blog will likely want to receive comments about the texts he’s written there, but probably not an email on how to buy more X.
As a general rule, if you or someone else plans to make money from the action incited by the email, it is most likely spam (not from a legal, but ‘moral’ perspective). This is especially true if the recipient is a private person and and you (or the third party profiting from the email) are a business.
Or, put another way: If you wouldn’t be allowed to call them, you aren’t allowed to send them email (modulo the cases were people opted in to you contacting them by email but not by telephone).
I don't see why she should defame GoDaddy. If I had a server there, and I was accused of sending spam, I would have the right to know which address considered my email as spam (and determine for myself whether the user subscribed to my services or not).
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