Yesterday, Jason Smathers, the 25-year old former AOL employee who admitted to selling 92 million AOL screen names and email addresses, was sentenced to 15 months in prison. In addition to the jail term the judge also sentenced him to pay restitution of three times the USD $28,000 he sold this data for.
Reports indicate that as many as 7 billion (billion with a “B”) spam emails were sent to this list. AOL says their direct costs may have been $300,000 or more and may be asking for increased damages.
Read the article on Yahoo News.
I was surprised at the jail term since the judge originally stated he thought no crime was committed based on the laws in place at the time of the incident.
Does this scenario really send a message that will deter others from doing this in the future?
Year: 2005
This week’s Email Insider article proposes replacing use of the unsubscribe rate with a “Disaffection Index” to more accurately reflect how well your email is being received.
For many marketers, the problem with using the Unsubscribe rate as a metric is that many users have come to believe that companies will not actually remove you from their list by using it. They simply delete the message instead and the unsubscribe rate becomes an inaccurate measure of how your message was received.
Ryan McKegney at RedFlagDeals just added a great reply to Jen Evan’s “Tossing the Ten Percent Rule for Good” post.
Here’s what he had to say…