Email Marketers Win Big!

In a case that has wide implications for how anti-spam laws are interpreted and used in court, email marketers recently won a decisive victory when a judge ordered a trial on the issue of whether an anti-spam plaintiff was a bona fide service provider under the California and Maryland statutes. The result was that the jury held you cannot use spam-traps for litigation! Paul Wagner, who ran a computer business from his parent’s home, sought more than $12 million from Kraft Foods under Maryland’s anti-spam law. Wagner had sued for thousands of emails forwarded by his brother in California, to an email address intentionally designed to lure spam. In other words he used a ‘spam-trap’. The captured ‘spam’  was then used as the basis for the lawsuit.