e360insight Seeks to Enforce Judgment against Spamhaus

The decision that awarded e360insight $11.7 million in damages from Spamhaus for blacklisting its emails was a default judgment because Spamhaus, a U.K. company, failed to show up in court to defend itself. Spamhaus claims the Illinois court has no jurisdiction over it and asked e360insight to file a suit in the U.K.

David Linhardt, CEO of email marketing company e360insight, says he has yet to exhaust his options within the U.S., writes Direct Magazine, and is trying to see if the favorable judgment can be enforced in any way. He also says he plans to implement a strategy that will make it very difficult for Spamhaus to do business in the U.S. He wouldn’t share details, and most email marketing experts say there is not a whole lot he can do, according to the article.

The Illinois court that ordered Spamhaus to pay e360insight $11.7 million in damages also barred Spamhaus from blocking emails from the company or any of the company’s affiliates, and required Spamhaus to post a message on its site for six months saying it mistakenly listed e360insight as a spammer.

Spamhaus originally responded to Linhardt’s suit, and the name of a famed anti-spam lawyer, Pete Wellborn, appeared on documents filed on Spamhaus’s behalf, but Spamhaus then reportedly failed to file discovery materials by an Aug. 17 deadline. Multiple sources say that Spamhaus balked at Wellborn’s price for seeing the case through, the article states.

Internet and email expert John Levine says the reason e360insight got everything it asked for is simply because Spamhaus didn’t show up. If Spamhaus had agreed to battle the case in a U.S. court, it would have been an admission that Illinois has jurisdiction over it.

Levine is quoted as saying that, in a just world, “the judge would have looked at [the order] and said, ‘This is ridiculous, I’m going to charge you $1,000 for wasting my time,’ and that would have been that.”