Comments on: Judges protect right to boot suspected spammer

Appeals court says EarthLink can't be held liable for disconnecting a customer it believed was spamming--even though he wasn't.

[hadaso]

They shouldn't have kept his mail

Earthlink shouldn't have kept the customer's mail. they should have either rejected all mail immediately, or forward the mail to an email address of his choice. Any other behaviour means loss of email.

Even if the contract and the law allows an ISP not to reject email sent to a former customer's mailbox that was closed, it should always be handled by either rejecting so senders no it was not received, or by allowing the former customer access for a limited period to the mailbox, at least through forwarding. It's the decent thing to do. Even free email providers should act this way (i.e., allow the user to terminate an account and then reject email immediately. Many services only allow discontinuation by abandoning an account and letting it die, meaning that email is not rejected and therefore lost)

[jfsayre]

Don't trust your film to Earthlink...

Huh?

This is a real life catch-22. Obviously, the judges don't like underground film production. But the way they dismissed the suit is a travesty.

By effectively ruling before hearing any evidence that Hall couldn't have lost any real money due to the interruption, the court concluded that the suit was too petty to be heard there, and dismissed the whole thing. Cute...

One of the recurrent difficulties with law is when judges overlook (willfully, in some cases) the reality of the facts. Here the provider was accepting nearly a years' worth of personal messages for Hall, without letting him know or letting the senders know that they hadn't been delivered. If Earthlink had simply bounced the mail, anyone who really wanted to get in touch with Hall probably could have found another way to do so - phone, fax, smail mail, or another email address. But instead the senders no doubt just assumed that Hall had lost interest, or wasn't reliable, and that was that. Film festivals, like book publishers, have far more prospective material than they can handle, so they're not going to chase a producer who doesn't respond to his messages. Maybe Delinquent was a dog, and wouldn't have been shown at the festival anyway, but Hall had purchased the account to market it, and he was entitled at a minimum to have Earthlink honor its side of the bargain.

To paraphrase the old country song, "don't trust your film to no backwoods Circuit judges, cause the isp hoards email on its drives..." (Sorry - it would be a lousy song, but then this was a lousy decision.)

[Razzl]

Need the meat of the story

The 2 previous respondants seem to think they know all the details of the case but to me the important parts have been left out--just what did he do to make them think he was sending spam? Was there a problem with the format, quantity, or timing of the messages? A reader can have no useful opinion on this until we know whether the complainant was actually doing something unreasonable or not. The devil is in the details...