White Buffalo is Spam

White Buffalo Ventures is a company that sends e-mail advertisements promoting dating sites to users who never requested to receive such messages. Some, including myself, would say that makes them spammers.

In 2003 they issued a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a near-complete listing of all University of Texas e-mail addresses. To put this in perspective, UT is a huge university. At last count it included 15 different campuses with the largest in excess of 50,000 students.

White Buffalo proceeded to send spam pitching goods to the student body. Specifically, they promoted a dating site targeted at UT students. After complaints by students, the faculty requested them to stop sending the messages. This however, had no effect. Anyone who has attempted to unsubscribe from a spammer's list knows how common this problem is.

Later that year, University administrators responded by configuring their servers to block e-mail originating from White Buffalo. They specifically used DNS blacklists to intercept messages originating from certain IP address blocks.

White Buffalo in turn filed a lawsuit. They claimed that the recently passed CAN-SPAM act somehow made them exempt from such message filtering as long as they complied with the rest of the law.

This is a creative interpretation of the legislation to say the least. Fortunately, the courts seemed to disagree with the spammer's assertions. Several recent court findings went against White Buffalo. It would appear that while CAN-SPAM does indeed sanction spamming, it doesn't say that service providers and users can't block unwanted e-mail.

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