Mad Dan is threatening to sue me as well. I didn’t spam him but someone did using a vulnerable script on my site.

He wants me to pay to keep him from suing, but I have been advised by counsel that it would be unenforceable and he could still sue me.

However, I don’t have the funds to fight this as I am a college student and my site makes little to no income.

I have my resume on my web site. This is for relevant jobs, not jobs making pizzas, or resume writing services, or resume spamming services. I don’t want a job making or delivering pizzas.

He could care less about the spam he receives. In fact his own website says he’s a former marketer himself.

I could respect his position if I wasn’t convinced in his ultimate goal here.

This had bloodsucker written all over it.

I receive about 300 emails a Day! No exaggeration. It is a royal pain in the arse! So, what really get’s my blood boiling is when I receive emails from some idiots who have about 2000 email addresses, that send me candidates and jobs that have NOTHING to do with the industry I recruit in.

Well, that really doesn’t hurt, really, the insult to injury came when after I asked them to REMOVE me in bolded, Red letters from their lists, they responded back with several more emails that said –

Karen, I know you said REMOVE ME from your list (yes this was with the bolded red letters) but can you please help us fill these following positions, or look at these ‘wonderful’ candidates.

These idiots were sending me about 30 emails a day. Okay.. to me, that is obnoxious. So I did end up reporting them. Hey, I did give them several warnings.. even called the idiots.. But those emails kept on comming..

So, my question, when is too much too much, and when do we acknowldege the please remove?

I never put spyware/trojans/viruses onto my website. I am informed that someone in Korea hacked into a NUMBER of websites hosted by Ipowerweb. I don’t even know HOW to put spyware/trojans/viruses onto a website. But I deleted the corrupted page and reposted the correct page after I found out about this.

Yes, CPK won its case. By lying and claiming that I had opted into Jobwarehouse.com. And, as a point of procedure, CPK did not allow me to see this information before trial started, which violates rules of small claims court.

To restate my position:

“The guy has every right to sue every email marketer under the sun if he feels that strongly about it. Let the courts decide who is right and who is wrong. Abiding by the court’s ruling [case 817845] is a small price to pay for a society where right-minded people can go about their legitimate business.”

Two asides:

1. Have you considered suing JobWarehouse for “scraping” your resume? I see you reference WSACorp on your site as a case in point.

2. Why when visiting your site why did warnings pop up indicating that you had attempted to install spyware/Trojans? Is that legal?

When all is said and done, Dan, I understand we all have to make a living. If your chosen path is to sue “spammers,” so be it. I am only grateful that - unlike many of those you have targeted - CPK were principled enough to make the trek to court - and win - not taking the path of least resistance, paying you to simply go away.

Good luck.  

1. California Pizza Kitchen hired a company in Florida called Recourse Communications Inc. to send email to fill open positions.

2. I did have my resume posted online on a couple jobsites when I lived in Los Angeles. I removed that resume sometime in April or May 2005, and with that any permission I had given to contact me re: jobs was revoked. I never re-posted the resume.

3. A YEAR later, I begain getting email from RCI advertising jobs for CPK in Los Angeles. Because the emails specified LA positions, obviously they were coming from the old resume that had gone down a year before.

4. The first 3 emails were legitimate.

5. Then I opted out.

6. Then I got confirmation that I had opted out and that I wouldn’t receive any more email.

7. And then I DID get a 4th email. Shally, sending email after a person opts out violates CAN-SPAM. Email that’s unsolicited — like the 4th one — is spam.

8. This 4th email purported to come from an actual individual at RCI, whom I will not name here to protect her privacy. I actually tracked her down. Turns out she had left RCI a MONTH before that 4th email was sent. So the email headers that SAID she sent it are obviously falsified, because she DIDN’T send any emails after she left the company. Colin, you’re absolutely right, under 15 USC 7707(b), CAN-SPAM does not preempt state laws to the extent that state laws prohibit falsity or deception in any part of the email. And, Colin, as I said above, I DIDN’T leave my resume up. I took it down a year before! And Recruitomatic, if an email says that Joe Blow sent it, but Joe Blow didn’t, that’s a FALSE HEADER.

9. At trial, the representative from CPK falsely claimed that I had opted in to receive these emails by posting my resume on jobwarehouse.com. Except, I never did post my resume at jobwarehouse.com. I had never even HEARD of jobwarehouse.com. I suspect jobwarehouse.com was just trying to build up its own database, and spidering resumes from hotjobs, monster, etc.

10. Even if I had granted permission to send me email originally, that permission was revoked when I removed my resume from the sites where I DID post it, and that permission was AGAIN revoked after I opted out. And yet there was a fourth email…

So, that’s the truth of it.