Arrested Customer Communications

It's getting harder and harder for businesses to communicate with their customers via e-mail. If the spammers themselves don't stop them, the measures users take to keep the spam under control very likely will. And, as one reader recently opined, when those measures include white-list vendor Spam Arrest, businesses also have to worry about their legal liability for contacting their own customers. "A significant

Since the reader doesn't know or want to know Spam Arrest, he sees no reason why he should have to trust them not to use their penalty terms to generate revenue in the future. "We cannot accept the Spam Arrest contract because we could be penalized thousands of dollars every time we notify our customers about a new version of our software. Theoretically they could save up our violations and hit us with a big charge of a hundred thousand dollars or more after a year or two with no warning that we were accruing a massive liability. If we send out a mass e-mail announcing an upgrade to 100,000 customers and 1 percent of them use Spam Arrest, and if we had validated the Spam Arrest agreement for those customers, we would have a $2,000,000 penalty on one mailing."

While the reader isn't worrying about the reference to the Can Spam Act in Spam Arrest's terms, it appears to him their definition of a violation goes beyond the law. "We won't be violating the Can Spam Act, because it allows us to send e-mail to our own customers. Spam Arrest does NOT allow us to send e-mail to our own customers without prior authorization. We cannot now go back and get hundreds of thousands of customer to give us pre-authorization. And the Spam Arrest contract requires that the customer "expressly consented to receive the message" rather than just requiring that we have customer consent to receive messages from us. How can the customer expressly consent to receive some particular message in the future? So basically it prohibits all commercial e-mail, not just what is defined as spam in law. Has anyone else objected to this abusive attempt by Spam Arrest to make new law and a gigantic profit at the same time?"

Yes, as a matter of fact, Spam Arrest is the only third party white-list vendor that I ever receive gripes about, and it's now always due to its very objectionable sender agreement. It's hard to understand why Spam Arrest believes such overreaching terms are necessary in its business unless it does plan an SCO-like move into litigation as a main source of revenue. Let's just hope that eventually its customers realize that they need to choose between doing business with Spam Arrest and doing business via e-mail with anyone else.

Got a beef of your own about how companies communicate with customers? Call my voice mail at 1 888 875-7916, or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com and make your voice heard on the Gripe Line.

Read and post comments about this story here.