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April 18, 2005
Hypertouch Pours Kraft/Gevalia a Bitter Cup
California-based Hypertouch has filed suit against Kraft Foods, Inc. today, taking them to task for their long-standing and blatant disregard for spam laws. Damages sought exceed $11M. With any luck, this will serve as a welcome warning to others in the same or similar boat - who not only disregard the law, but willfully compromise their own customers' personal information by sharing addresses (which are never confirmed as "opt-in") with others; and, who, whether by incompetence or willful disregard, ignore unsubscription requests, and otherwise set such a horrible example.
It's been a while since we last received mail from Gevalia, to a scraped address only used for inbound mail, but we haven't forgotten, and we wish Hypertouch luck. For two years (from 2002 to 2004) we regularly received such from a wide variety of Gevalia-hired spamhouses, the first on record to an address that hadn't been used in two years, much more to my address, several to customers (one of whom eventually repudiated email altogether, and spam sent to that address comprised 47% of ALL SPAM sent to one of our servers during February 2003, six months after they'd requested that the account be shut down). In a nutshell, Gevalia spammed as many people (or addresses) as possible, by hiring spammers, who then kept and sold or spammed the addresses for unrelated products and services. We hope the jury comes back and recommends that Gevalia pay double.
I won't mention how difficult it has been during the composition of this post to refrain from coffee puns, but I know you feel my pain.
Posted by schampeo at April 18, 2005 5:01 PM