Spammer wins restraining order against Spamcop

San Francisco (CA) - Scott Richter, President of mass e-mailing firm OptInRealBig.com was successful in the first phase of his lawsuit against anti-spam group Spamcop : The organization for now is barred from sending complaints to ISPs other than its own as well as removing email addresses from such complaints.

The temporary restraining order is critical for Richter’s business and will be in effect until May 20. Spamcop’s complaints often resulted in the cancellation of Richter’s contracts with ISP’s and limited his bandwidth and connectivity to send out his campaigns.

OptInRealBig.com claims that its emailings stays within the law and are sent out only to people in the US who sign up for the service. According to Richter, more than 100 million emails are sent every day from his servers which are all located the US.

Representatives from Ironport, which operates Spamcop, will appear before the United States District Court for the Northern District of California to show why the restraint should be removed.

Ironport as well as other email marketers were surprsied by the judge’s decision. If upheld, it would be first case of a spammer barring an anti-spam group from reporting unwanted commercial emails.

In May of 2003, email marketer Eddy Marin and his Florida-based Emarketersamerica.org sued anti-spam group Spamhaus in a similar action with little success. The case was dismissed in October 2003.

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