This isn’t exactly double jeopardy, but somehow it ought to be.
Bad enough to receive junk mail from a spammer – but then to receive a junk lawsuit as well? Ptooey!
And it is exactly that with which Jay Stuler is dealing. Having received what he considered spam from Atriks, Inc., of New Hampshire, for two years, he reported them to their ISP. As a result, apparently, their ISP gave them the boot, and Atriks, in turn, gave Stuler the legal finger.
Atriks is also known in some circles by their other companies, which include Greenhorse, Sendmails, VirtualMDA, and Distributed Mail Corp (DMC).
In the lawsuit recently filed by Atriks and DMC against Stuler, the plaintiff claims that Stuler has caused them financial harm. They also include libel charges for Stuler labeling them as “spammers”, their CEO Brian Haberstroh a “criminal”, and the company “a notorious spam gang”.
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Well, let Aunty say this about that:
http://theinternetpatrol.com/ref/atriks-google
Oh, yes, and this is a cached copy of their webpage describing their VirtualMDA machine. This page used to appear on their Sendmails.com site (they had at one time dozens of domains through which they operated, including the of course completely innocent, “bigfooot.com”, “hotmailservers.com”, and “yahoomailservers.com”. Strangely, this page is no longer available on their site, but through the magic of Google:
http://theinternetpatrol.com/ref/atriks-webpage
…which says, in part, and Aunty quotes:
“Sendmails Corporation has created relationships with over 60,000 individuals throughout the world who act as sending agents for the Sendmails Corporation Distributed Email Delivery System. Sendmails Corporation has developed a software called VirtualMDA (see www.virtualmda.com ) which resides on these sending agents’ machines and periodically talks to an array of servers within our data center, looking for messages to deliver. When messages are available, each agent machine can receive up to 100 emails to deliver. For example, with 20,000 agents sending 100 emails each, the Sendmails Corporation Distributed Email Delivery System can deliver 2 Million emails in one quick shot.
…
Distributed delivery prevents blocking
Sendmails Corporation developed our Distributed Email Delivery System because many email providers will obstruct otherwise legal emails from very large senders at will and without notification to the sender/list owner. Using sending agents and VirtualMDA, blocking is much less likely.”
Draw your own conclusions.
In the meantime, Aunty will be busy lining up a good defense attorney.
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This is absolutely ridiculous. The company is in business to send spam, and they want to say that this individual has caused them financial losses and has defamed their name.
Let me go on record to say that they *are* notorious spam kings, and that they deserved their just rewards if they thought they could operate under the auspices of their ISP and never get caught. States are now beginning to enact legislation to combat spam delivery, and that means that the states are also responsible for defaming said company, as well as causing them financial loss.
Pretty soon, the company will have to take on the Justice Department as well as the Supreme Court, arguing that they are a legitimate business venture – the main reason for their lawsuit is not to actually get monetary returns from the individual, but to put up a block quickly against anti-spam legislation as they are probably going to fight this all the way to the top, an din the meantime, also introduce requests that anti-spam legislation be put on hold until their case has been heard and their future determined.
A very sneaky, insidious move – and very politically adroit.
We’ll have to pay close attention to this case – it will have far reaching repercussions.