“Forward to a Friend” and Germany
27 November 2013
Lots of folks have been talking recently about a September BGH decision holding that “emails sent using a ‘send to a friend’ function are to be considered spam, unless the recipient had given prior express consent” Federal Court of Justice, Email Recommendation (2013).* This is a fairly significant development in law. As a general rule,…
Don’t opt-out of spam?
19 November 2013
Yesterday, Laura Atkins wrote a blog post which suggests that unsubscribing from spam doesn’t result in receiving more spam (Atkins 2013). I know that this is a project that she’s been working on for at least a month, and I don’t have any reason to doubt her results. Additionally, she links to (Magill 2013), (Pogue 2013),…
Wherein Zoominfo causes spam
18 November 2013
Zoominfo, DiscoverOrg, and Lead411 are popular lead generation sources. Every once in a while someone comes along and tries to defend the use of crowd sourced list generation services (of which ZoomInfo and Jigsaw seem to be the largest). These systems work by allowing people to download contact information for third parties in exchange for the…
Looking at a spam stream: The story of Jimmy Walker
8 November 2013
I was recently asked about how to go about proving that someone was not obtaining email addresses in a direct, opt-in manner. The methodology won’t surprise you, and if you have been involved in helping problematic clients for a while, the results might not even surprise you. The “someone” at issue was a payday loaner.…