The nation's four largest e-mail account providers yesterday announced a coordinated legal attack on spammers, using a new federal law to file six lawsuits in courts around the country.
The suits by America Online, EarthLink Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. target what their lawyers called some of the largest spam operations, accounting for hundreds of millions of e-mails hitting their networks every month.
By combining investigative resources, the companies are putting spammers on notice that "we're going to locate you and we're going to sue you," said Randall Boe, AOL's general counsel, at a news conference with his counterparts at the other companies.
The lawsuits are the first major results of a consortium the companies formed last spring to combat spam. The companies also are working on technology solutions to curb unwanted e-mail, but so far they have not agreed on common standards for changing how e-mail is electronically identified so that spam can be more effectively weeded out.
The four Internet providers have filed dozens of lawsuits over the past several years, using state anti-spam and fraud statutes. But their counsels said that the new federal law makes it easier to sue regardless of jurisdiction.
Although the companies trumpeted passage of the federal Can-Spam Act, which took effect in January, e-mail spam has continued unabated, accounting for an estimated 60 percent of all e-mail.
The law, supported by the marketing and Internet industries, was opposed by anti-spam organizations because it supplanted some tougher state anti-spam provisions and allows for marketers to send messages until they are told to stop by recipients.
"We're happy anytime somebody whales on a spammer," said John Mozena, co-founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail. "But we don't think these [lawsuits] are going to make any fundamental difference in the amount of spam that people receive. History shows us that spammers ignore these suits."
Jennifer Martin , spokeswoman for e-mail security firm CipherTrust Inc., said her company's clients have seen an increase in spam, from 68 percent of their inbound mail to 79 percent, since the federal law took effect. Some of that increase, she said, is from marketers realizing that the new law allows them to send e-mail messages without permission, as long as they honor requests from users to be removed from future mailings.
But the companies argue that by targeting the worst spammers, they will make a dent in the volume of spam and encourage others to give up the business. H. Robert Wientzen, head of the Direct Marketing Association, said he expects criminal cases to soon be brought by law enforcement agencies under provisions of the federal law.
Several of the suits filed Tuesday night named defendants only as "John Doe," meaning that further investigation is needed to verify the identities of owners and operators of mailing concerns.
One set of defendants, known to Yahoo as the Head Operation Group, is alleged to be a Canada-based operation accused of soliciting Yahoo e-mail users' data and selling the information to other marketers.
