Judge: Spam Exempt From Law When Sender Names Self

A Washington judge has ruled that spam is "personal e-mail" exempt from anti-spam laws if it's written in a style that suggests familiarity with the recipient. In the words of small-claims Judge Judith Eiler herself (via Slashdot):

"These are anti-spam laws, which imply that they are mail just sent out in huge bulks, which would be the antithesis of a personal e-mail. And here he puts his name, in fact this is the person that you directly sued rather than somebody that's in a corporation or a company. The court does think that there's some indication that this is a personal-type e-mail. While it may have gone out to a number of people, it doesn't have quite the earmarks."

This twit sits at the business end of the whole "legal spam" fiasco, wherein this nation "banned" unsolicited bulk email by outlining how it may legally be sent. Lawmakers are bought and paid for, but the ignorance and stupidity of judges like Eiler is far more reliable.

Following is the spam itself, addressed to "Dear Webmaster" and hocking a scammy link exchange scheme.

To: [email protected]
Subject: Reminder: Link exchange with your site http://slashdot.org
X-PHP-Script: www.theeashblahblah.com/linkmachine/auto.php for 87.102.22.100
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:34:26 -0400
From: Roderick Eash
Reply-to: [email protected]
Message-ID:
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: PHPMailer [version 1.72]
Errors-To: [email protected]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="b1_b43cabef83c9f9123db7a78ef9a73362" Dear Webmaster,

My name is Roderick Eash, and I run the web site Work At Home Business
Opportunities | Online Career Training:

http://www.theeashblahblah.com/

The other day I wrote you to let you know I'm very interested in exchanging links. I'm sending this reminder in case you didn't receive my first letter. I've gone ahead and posted a link to your site, on this page:

http://www.theeashblahblah.com/linkmachine/resources/resources_home_based_business_41.html

As you know, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising our search rankings and generating more traffic to both of our sites. Please post a link to my site as follows:

Title: Work At Home Business Opportunities | Online Career Training
Description: Your Source, and Resource for starting a Home Business, or
Growing the One You're In.

Once you've posted the link, let me know the URL of the page that it's on, by entering it in this form:

http://www.theeashblahblah.com/linkmachine/resources/link_exchange.php?ua=_ua9&site_index=MTg4MTgwMjc%3D

You can also use that form to make changes to the text of the link to your site, if you'd like.

Thank you very much,

Roderick Eash