Posted on 03/19/2002 9:59:57 AM PST by ex-Texan
A feel-good tale of greenbacks and spam
By Margie Moule
Tell the truth: Aren't we all vicarious Rocky Balboas, rooting for underdogs, yearning for the little guys to stagger up from the canvas, beat the odds and vanquish the giants?
Perhaps that's why the story of Harold Hickok's victory over the huge, multinational, multibillion-dollar company is a delight: it was Harold vs. Goliath, and we were rooting for Harold with the rock in his hand.
Only it wasn't a rock. It was a small claims court suit. And as part of his victory, Portlander Harold Hickok promised not to reveal the name of the company. So let's call it Goliath. (Note: If there really is a company named Goliath somewhere, it has nothing to do with this story.)
Another reason Harold's story is so satisfying: His fight began because he was exasperated at Goliath for sending him unwanted e-mails, otherwise known as spam.
Goliath first e-mailed Harold in Dec. 2000. "I got a message congratulating me on becoming a customer," Harold remembers. "I sent them an e-mail saying 'I'm not a customer, I've never asked to be a customer, and please don't send me anything.' "
Goliath was silent until April 4, 2001, the day Harold received, via e-mail, "a daily summary of Wall Street activity." Exactly the kind of spam Harold did not want to receive. "I e-mailed back, saying 'Take me off your subscription list. I don't want this.' " And then Harold put a little bite in his request. "I wrote, 'I will charge you $25 per message as a reading fee,' " for every subsequent e-mail.
Harold says the fee was not just a threat; it was a reasonable charge for time and equipment. "I have to download the message, to find out it's junk and delete it. If you're using my download time, you are in effect using my services. During that time I can't use my computer, which is essential in my business."
Undaunted, Goliath sent Harold another financial update April 18. Again, Harold sent back a message explaining his fee. And so it continued for months. "I actually put up with them for a while," Harold says. "They sent messages almost daily. Finally, in July, I explained, 'I'm a lawyer, I can sue, and I'm going to if you don't shape up.' "
Now Goliath began sending Harold unsubscription confirmations in addition to the market reports. Now Harold was getting several market reports and a subscription cancellation notice daily.
"Aug. 1, I figured enough is enough," says Harold. He began sending Goliath bills. "I should have figured the charges since April 18, when I first told them it would be $25 per message. But since I hadn't been pressing the point every day, I decided to start on Aug. 1."
The e-mails kept coming. "The only break was on Sept. 12 and 13," Harold says. "They apparently didn't publish on those days."
Harold is an attorney in private practice, but he says anybody can do what he did in December. Harold filed a lawsuit against Goliath in the Washington County Small Claims court for the money it owed him. Harold next started a process called "discovery." "That's demanding information from them, with court sanction," Harold says.
At last Harold had Goliath's attention. There were two obvious signs: All e-mails from Goliath to Harold stopped. And at last Goliath responded to Harold.
Goliath's lawyers told the court that Harold had no right to take discovery for a small claims case. Harold sent Goliath a copy of Oregon Rules, proving he had a perfect right.
Goliath then told the court, Harold says, "that when they get unsubscription messages, all their machine reads is the e-mail address. It can't read comments. Therefore they had never formed a contract with me, because they had never read my messages."
Did this give Harold pause? "No. It made me angry. Who set up their machine, me or them? If they set up their machine to block communication, they are solely responsible for all communication that is blocked."
Oregon law also allowed Harold to ask for documents, which he now did, requesting a copy of every unsubscription request Goliath had received in the last year.
Instead, Goliath offered a tiny settlement. Much less than Harold's $25 per e-mail fee.
Now Harold was really angry. He notified Goliath that unless it paid the amount he'd requested, he would raise his demand to cover every e-mail he'd received since April 18 . . . a figure that approached $5,000.
With this rock, Harold brought down Goliath. On Friday, Harold received documents from Goliath to settle his case in the amount of his original request, plus court costs.
The settlement will not make him rich, but it has given Harold great satisfaction. "I've got some expertise, but Joe Citizen could do this. In many ways I felt like Joe Citizen myself, standing up to a multinational conglomerate and saying, 'Will you acknowledge that I exist and do the right thing?' "
If Joe Citizen feels the need of legal help, Harold says, "Many attorneys will give you enough assistance to triumph in small claims court for a couple (of) hundred dollars."
But if you decide to take on your spammer alone, Harold says, keep copies of every e-mail you receive or send. And don't be afraid to go to small claims court. "Forget the throat," Harold says. "Go for the pocketbook. You can hit them back, and it will hurt."
Reach Margie Boule at 503-221-8450, 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201, or marboule@aol.com.
So, who won? The lawyer won - no one else.
One lawyer got paid off to go away. I doubt Goliath even woke up.
Harold was bought, for a very small price. I don't remember King David taking two shekels to leave the Valley of Elah.
True, but the only reason he got any satisfaction at all was that this was a real live corporation. Virtually all spam that I get comes from fly-by-night operations that are "judgement proof".
I forward each spam I get as an attachment to SpamCop. They parse the email headers & forward spam reports to all ISPs whose routers have touched the email. The legitimate ISPs then close their open relays or shut down the accounts of the spammers.
It doesn't destroy the spammers, but it does increase their operating costs. It's like cutting the grass.
Might be "judgement proof", but last week I got return emails from AOL, Lycos, and Hotmail that they had closed the accounts of those who I had reported sending me unsolicited, objectionable material. There ARE ways to strike these guys back, the public just needs to be educated in how...
Az
I suspected that hitting Remove just put me on more lists that then got burned onto CDs & sold around forever - and after reading up on current spam techniques, it looks like that's EXACTLY what happened to me. So now I just report them to SpamCop & hope their ISP is charging them a shutoff fee.
I did start getting e-mails soliciting kiddie porn. I forwarded those to the FBI....
SpamCop's cool because it automatically parses the header to extract all the return-path hops, and finds the real IP addresses. (One trick everyone seems to use is they put completely bogus From: addresses in the header.) The report it generates shows the spam originated from some account in .mx, .cn, .kr, .es, .se ... then it got routed thru some ISP's open relays in another country, etc. So SpamCop sends the report to every ISP it could detect along the path, as well as the ISP for any websites mentioned in the email body, etc. etc. Who knows where the spam REALLY originates???
Anyway, it's the best solution I've found so far that doesn't take up all day doing the legwork myself. :-)
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