When you ask one of us deliverability consultants who've been around a while, why can't somebody just sue when they're unhappy about being blocked as a spammer, we remember back to that gentler time, fourteen years ago, when Holomaxx decided that they would teach Yahoo, Microsoft, IronPort and Return Path a lesson.
It didn't really amount to anything. As Venkat Balasubramani explained at the time for Eric Goldman's blog, CAN-SPAM makes it clear that internet service providers are free to pretty much filter whatever mail they want in the name of stopping spam. And that courts don't seem interested in interfering with that.
It's a different judicial environment today, for sure. But not different enough for the RNC to have prevailed against Google, at least so far. The advice some folks gave Holomaxx back then included, "that sword you think you hold may actually be a banana," and Monty Python has long trained internet service providers (and spam fighters) on how to fend off banana attacks.
Hard to believe that it's been nearly fourteen years since Holomaxx sued various spam filterers and internet service providers, alleging that their mail was being unfairly filtered or rejected, given that the mail complied with CAN-SPAM.
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