Richter Sues Spamcop - Tom's Hardware

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Email marketer s= ues anti-spam group Spamcop

By Wolfgang Gruener, Senior Editor

April 30, 2004 - 11:24 EST

San Francisco (CA) - Scott Richter, President of Email marketing firm OptinRealBig.com, has filed suit against Ironport, which runs the anti-spam website Spamcop. According to Richter, Spamcop's initiatives = have damaged the reputation of his company and forces ISPs to terminate contract= ual agreements with OptinRealBig.com and its upstream providers.

If you receive spam, it's likely you receive emails fr= om Scott Richter, whose email marketing firm OptinRealBig.com claims to be one= of the nation's fastest growing email marketing firms. Still, Richter insists = that he is doing nothing wrong. To prove his point, he is not just defending him= self against current lawsuits against him. He now has files suit against Spamcop, one of the most visible anti-spam groups out there.

"We are going to send a message," said Richt= er in an email interview with Tom's Hardware Guide. The complaint filed alleges "Tortuous Interference with Contract, Interference with Contractual Relationship, Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage, Negligent Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage, Unfair Competit= ion, Trade Libel and asked the Court for Injunctive Relief." Richter is ask= ing for $1 million in damages.

According to Richter, "Spamcop has engaged in con= duct which damaged Optin's reputation and forces ISPs to terminate their contrac= tual agreements with OPTIN and its upstream providers." The complaint alleg= es that "prior to sending solicited complaints by consumers to the Optin's originating ISP's, Spamcop alters the complaints it receives by removing the email address of the person or entity seeking to be taken off a mailing list thereby rendering the email anonymous."

Richter claims that because the complaints fail to ide= ntify the original email sender, Optin cannot comply with the CAN-SPAM ACT, which requires the sender of an email to remove the address of any person who does not desire to receive any further email. Optin would have "no means to determine if the recipient of the email has previously requested the email," Richter said in a statement.

Ironport could not be reached for comment.

One year ago, email marketer Eddy Marin and his Florida-based Emarketersamerica.org sued anti-spam group Spamhaus. Steve Linford, director of Spamhaus, said the complaint was merely a SLAPP (Strat= egic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) designed to intimidate antispam activists. "All of the information and allegations contained in it are false," Linford says. "One of the individuals being sued is my brother who lives in Italy and doesn't even know what Spamhaus.org is,"= ; he said to PCWorld.com. The case was dismissed "with prejudice" in October 2003 by a Florida Court, indicating Marin's accusations were denied= by default, according to Spamhaus.

Scott Richter's 32-employee firm sends "several h= undred million emails" to Internet users using its own "only US-based servers" as well as upstream providers. Richter claims that he is stri= ctly sending emails only to people who have signed up for his services on his we= bsite. "If someone does not want our emails, we can be easily identified and remove users from our list by request," he said.

Optinrealbig.com is currently the target of a lawsuit = filed by Microsoft and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in December of 200= 3. In parallel lawsuits against Richter, the two parties say that his firm conducted in illegal spam campaigns through 514 compromised IP addresses in= 35 countries spanning six continents. He said that he already rejected an offer from Spitzer to settle the case for $100,000. "Messing with us is a big mistake," In a statement he describes the lawsuit as "PR stunt&qu= ot; and "one of the worst smear campaigns against legitimate internet busi= ness interests of recent times."