Coffee and Spam

Kraft Foods has been accused of sending email spam.

Apparently they hired various contractors to send commercial messages promoting their new coffee brand, Gevelia. A California based ISP, Hypertouch is taking legal action on the matter. They are suing Kraft and Gevelia's brand owner for $11 million. ISPs often spend large amounts of money on e-mail filtering in an effort to protect users.

The case involves only about 8,000 offending emails. By spamming standards this is a drop in the bucket. Commonly spam campaigns will be comprised of millions or even tens of millions of junk email messages.

Gevalia has defended itself claiming that customers can "opt-out" from its marketing programs via their website. The lawsuit however claims that Gevalia is abusing addresses sent to it for exclusion. As a test, the ISP "opted-out" an unused email address. Shortly thereafter that address started receiving unwanted messages.

Gevalia claims that the culprits are in fact third parties hired by the company, and not Gevalia itself. The CAN-SPAM act only holds the actual email sender accountable. These and other loopholes have rendered the law relatively ineffective at blocking spam.

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