our leading Internet service providers announced yesterday that they had filed a new round of lawsuits against senders of junk e-mail, or spam. The suits include the first filed by America Online against spammers who use instant messaging, a practice the online industry calls spimming.
AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and EarthLink filed seven lawsuits in four states under the federal antispam law, which aims at stopping billions of unsolicited electronic messages, many with false headings that mislead consumers or seek to sell products that do not exist.
One of two lawsuits filed in Virginia on Wednesday by AOL focuses on 20 unnamed defendants it says sent junk e-mail via AOL's instant-messaging service and chat rooms. Curtis Lu, AOL's deputy general counsel, said that the industry's efforts to shut down spammers were driving them to new channels like instant messaging. "We want to nip this in the bud," Mr. Lu said in a conference call with reporters yesterday.
While the suit is not the first to take on spimming, AOL called it the most significant to date because AOL has the largest instant-messaging network and because the suit includes messages in chat rooms.
Spam messages sent to instant-messaging addresses typically include a link to a Web site, providing "fingerprints" that can help law enforcement officials track down the senders, an AOL spokesman, Nicholas Graham, said.
With about 1.5 billion instant messages being sent over its network daily, AOL receives several hundred thousand complaints a day from customers bothered by spimmers. That is in addition to the roughly three million complaints it receives every day about spam, the company said. A second AOL lawsuit is aimed at spam sent through e-mail.
Microsoft filed three lawsuits against unnamed defendants, accusing them of sending unsolicited messages selling herbal medications, cut-rate mortgages and get-rich-quick schemes. Aaron Kornblum, a lawyer for Microsoft, said spimming was not a major problem for the company because its instant messaging was a more closed system than AOL's. Still, Microsoft filed the industry's first lawsuit against a spimmer in early 2003.
Also on Wednesday, Yahoo sued East Coast Exotic Entertainment Group and Epoth, two providers of sex-related content, accusing them of sending anonymous e-mail with sexually explicit subject lines and with no option for removing a name from the mailing list. EarthLink sued 50 unidentified defendants it accused of sending deceptive or illegal e-mail offering prescription drugs, cut-rate loans and other services.
