The early commercial internet produced spam almost immediately. It also produced people angry enough to turn the spam into evidence.
DanHatesSpam.com is Daniel Balsam’s public-service site about unsolicited commercial email and the legal fights that followed it.
Balsam says he has been storing and tracking spam since the spring of 2002. Rather than limiting the project to filters and blocklists, he pursued senders and advertisers through small-claims, superior and federal court cases, particularly under California anti-spam law.
The site says he accumulated more than fifty court judgments against spammers, along with settlements and additional cases. It also preserves media coverage stretching back through the 2000s and early 2010s, when spam was one of the internet’s loudest everyday irritations and lawmakers were still arguing over how to regulate it.
A personal grievance became a web archive
The structure is wonderfully specific.
There are pages for small-claims cases, federal cases, spam law, research tools and press coverage. Old links point to WHOIS services, secretary-of-state databases, IP lookups and other tools used to identify the entities behind unwanted mail.
This is not a generic “spam is bad” essay. It is a record of one person’s method for turning unwanted messages into names, companies, complaints and court filings.
The site is also a snapshot of a particular legal moment. Balsam criticizes the federal CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 from a consumer perspective and explains why he continued relying on California provisions dealing with falsity and deception. Anyone using the site for current legal guidance should verify the law independently; the valuable thing here is the preserved history of how an individual internet user fought the problem at the time.
There is even a deliberately aggressive no-spam policy claiming a $25,000 fee for reading and responding to unsolicited commercial email sent to addresses on his domain. Whether one loves the tactic or rolls their eyes at it, nobody can accuse the site of hiding its position.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list keeps uncovering pages where old internet problems are documented by the people who were actually fighting them. This is a good example.
Spam history is usually told through legislation, botnets and statistics.
DanHatesSpam.com preserves the smaller scale: one inbox, one angry recipient, a stack of evidence, and eventually a surprising number of court cases.