SCI/TECH: Accused Spammer Sues Individual Who Reported It

An internet user who reported a bulk email spammer to the spammer's ISPs is being sued by the spammer. Atriks, also known as Distributed Mail, is suing Jay Stuler and denies that they are involved in any spamming operation. Spamhaus, an independent anti-spam entity has numerous instances of abuse by Atriks on its website. Stuler says that if he can be sued for reporting spam, then anyone can be sued.



I hate spam. I will go to almost any length to avoid spam. I report spam to my ISP and the senders' ISPs. If you're like me, then you should pay attention to this suit. Jay Stuler is fighting this case and has a website to solicit funds and to keep others apprised of his case.

Related News Links:
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[edit on 05/1/21 by GradyPhilpott]

Im lucky, i guess. I dont have a problem with it. Some here and there, but its always in my bulk folder, so its no biggie. How bad is it ?

Spam filtering has improved considerably in recent years, but it just became overwhelming on WebTV and for a long time I was assiduious about reporting it.

This is ridiculous. What next ? A burglar breaks in to someone's house and sues the homeowner for reporting him to the police ?

:shk:

Originally posted by Pisky
This is ridiculous. What next ? A burglar breaks in to someone's house and sues the homeowner for reporting him to the police ?

:shk:

Well, no, but you better shoot to kill. Homeowners have been sued for shooting and disabling a burglar for life.

Looks to me like this suit is doomed to failure.

The alleged "spammer's' contract is with the companies. It is the choice of the companies whether to continue or terminate the contract. Contracts are terminated at the choice of contracting parties, to which contract, the poor guy was never privy to. So, a suit against a defendant for losses due to termination of a contract, which contract the defendant was never a party to, has got to be legally and hopelessly flawed.

I haven't read the suit yet, but what I am guessing is this one guy may have caused a legitimate business to lose money. Jay Stuler filled out a form on the net at one time and left the box "please notify me of your specials and your partner company special offers"...that allowed his email to be added to a mailing list of people that have opted-in or subscribed to have product info sent to them. Now this Stuler gets some and reports the company and the company loses it's ISP's and loses a great deal of money...when they did nothing wrong.

I am not for the spammers...but I own a couple of companies in the southeast and could easily see how this could have happened....I have seen it happen before.

Spam filters might keep the spam out of your mailbox but it doesn't stop the internet being poluted with it.

Every single day, Terabytes over Terabytes of bandwidth are wasted all over the net because of unsolicited email and other spam methods. For ISP's this callculates to millions in bandwidth bills being paid that wouldn't have to be paid if there was no spam. For users, it means that their ISP gets more expensive and sometimes slows down all over their network because of spam.

As said above, it could be that this user signed a "Please notify me of special offers from you or your partners" thing.
But these are illegal and invalid if the same page doesn't display who these partners are.

This user cannot be sued since even if he singed a notification page, there is no way he could know that this company was one of these supposed partners.

The easyest way to determine if one of these mailers is a true spammer or a "partner" is by following the emails "opt-out" links and making it remove your email. At the same time, use a new email addy and fill in the opt-out form with that new email addy too.

Normaly your new email addy can't be in their database and the only mention of it was trough the opt-out page.

So if you now keep getting email on the old email addy, and start getting spam on the new one too, the company your dealing with is definatly an SPAM Corp.

Alot of people get spam from a company in 1 box and when going to the opt-out link, they fill in all the email addresses they have to be sure that none of them will supposedly get spam from that company again.

This actualy is a trap and you will now recieve spam on all of your email addresses from this company.

SPAM earns my ire...
it is a shameless business... it is the "dark side" the internet force...
If i were to become hopelessly greedy and didn't care how i made money... I would rather sell my body than stoop so low as to be a spammer...
spammers are reprehinsible and if they get cut from an ISP, then it is becuase they have been found to be in violation of the CANNED SPAM act..

otherwise they would still be in business...
as the the one user that proposed that he "shut down a legitimate business" becuase he might have signed up accidentally... whoa boss back up the horses...
did you know that for SPam to not be SPam , it also has to have an "opt out" link (MOST DON'T HAVE REAL LINKS) ... these usually just sign you up for more Spam, due to the lack of oversight and control of the spam industry...
so even the controls that are put in the system are shorted out...

I have yet to run into ONE e-mail marketing company that isn't guilty of Spam due to the massive abuse of the process. In other words... even if a company is following all the rules of the law, they still allow other companies to "steal" data for a nice price... therby signing everyone up for more spam...

If Spammers would simply follow the rules then there would be NO MORE SPAM... because no one wants it...
If they are still in business (or closed out of business) then my bet is that they are guilty as the rest of the miscreants...

As soon as Spam is truly prosecuted in all countries, then it will end... the only type of marketing that should be on the internet is the kind you go out and find, or see on a webpage... afterall... if you wanted something, wouldn't you just go find it? it is called the WORLD wide web for a reason.

Lawyers and Spammers, an unholy alliance!

I wonder how long until anyone convicted or arrested for a crime will be able to sue their victim for damages caused by the consequneces of the criminal getting caught?

Personally I hope that the spammers loose and that the person being sued counter-sues. I hope that he then wins if this happens. Anyhow for reporting spam and causing the lose of service to the spammer.

Personally I think that this company is trying to intimidate people. This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to barf all over my keyboard. If the spammers win this then I may as well invent the internet 2.0, because we'll need it if it becomes illegal to do the right thing.

I think it's time for anti-spammers to unite and annilate the forces of the spammers!

[edit on 1/21/2005 by cyberdude78]

I think there is legitimate advertising out there on the net that is asked for by individuals. What often happens though is a companys lack of regard for "how much spam" from subsidiary companies it deals with are sent to an individual after that request. That is the problem here. The sad thing is this will all eventually lead to what can be advertised anywhere that is not PC. It will come to that because those persons with enough time and money will keep fighting this in courts. The connection of what larger company the spammer deals with and/or got their information on the person spammed will come out in the open. Public-wide opinion of that companys dealing with the spammer in a lax way will cause sales of that company to go down (feduciary responsibility to shareholders). To bring sales back up the company will change its advertising tactics. All this eventually leads to more and more companies being so PC about their paid message that it will be nothing more than text on a tv. Sure, it might not get quite that bad; but that road will be taken. Unless of course someone is smart enough to sue a company over their connection to a spammer. Who knows.