Eclectical Engineering

After a brief absence (occasioned by personal and business matters), I am back as promised to update the E360 v. Comcast story; it’s a decided setback for E360Insight, LLC, but perhaps somewhat better news for the rest of us who find our in-boxes constantly brimming with unwanted commercial appeals. I’m turning once again to the folks at http://www.spamsuite.com/ for the blow-by-blow.

As you may recall (perhaps from reading my post below), the feisty and litigious little e-mail marketing firm E60Insight LLC, headed by one David Linhardt, filed suit in a Chicago court on January 15 against the mega-ISP and cable-TV provider Comcast for blocking its marketing mail as spam. That was actually just the start of E360’s complaints, however, which went on to encompass computer fraud and abuse (for Comcast’s having supposedly returned misleading SMTP bounce messages that somehow damaged E360’s databases (?!)), and even violation of E360’s first-amendment free-speech rights (which, for some reason, E360 figured that Comcast—a private business—was supposed to be enforcing). E360 sought over US$21 million in damages from Comcast.

In a decision released on April 11, Judge James B. Zagel granted Comcast’s motion for immediate judgment, effectively dismissing the suit without allowing E360 so much as a chance for discovery (i.e., to allow its lawyers go through Comcast’s records regarding the E360 mailings). This latter point was probably the least welcome news for E360, which might otherwise have been able to collect some valuable intelligence on Comcast’s mail filtering operations.

Perhaps stinging from the judge’s not-so-veiled rebuke (“…Some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call [E360] a spammer”), E360 has filed for reconsideration of the dismissal. On the other hand, this may just be a largely pro-forma action laying the groundwork for an appeal of the dismissal to a higher court.

At the same time, E360 also filed a motion to dismiss Comcast’s countersuit against E360, which alleged violations of CAN SPAM and Illinois anti-spam laws, as well as the same Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 USC 1030) that E360 tried to wield against Comcast.

Meanwhile, in other E360 litigation news, one of its other prominent targets has found E360 rather less cooperative in discovery than E360 wanted Comcast to be. The Spamhaus Project has filed a motion alleging that E360 has not provided the information that Spamhaus seeks in order to ascertain the basis for the US$11 million award that E360 seeks for Spamhaus having blocklisted its outgoing mail host addresses. What’s sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander, at least according to E360.