GERMAN SUPREME COURT ISSUES SPAM RULING
The German Federal Supreme Court has ruled that spam will be
permissible when the recipient has given his express consent
to receive the email. The court added that the sender has
the burden of proof in showing the existence of the
recipient's consent or interest. German coverage at
<http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/46627>
I would love to see a correct translation of this.
The summary above correlates with CAN-SPAM which does allow for vendor-user
relationships as long as the sender is SMTP (or stated IETF) compliant.
As I see it, this means the BURDEN is higher on SMTP to reject mail at the
transaction level keeping pace with ECPA legal precedence.
The idea of accepting transaction only to POST SMTP rejected with "unproven"
fuzzy analysis is leading us down a wrong path of tort and malpractice
liability.
I really and truly hope we can keep all this at a system level. We had it
right from the beginning for many years. Lets not open a new can of worms.
Again, if we change SMTP to include mail control header information, great.
But we don't have this luxury today.
--
Hector Santos, Santronics Software, Inc.
http://www.santronics.com