See attached letter.

Letter from Marcus Evans to Scientific Spam, 21 June 2016

This post will be edited with responses to the points presented.

And here’s the response.

PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

We do not recall signing a non-disclosure agreement with you. In many jurisdictions, ours included, unilateral contracts such as the one you are trying to propose by labeling your unwanted correspondence “private and confidential”, are null and void, so we are publishing your correspondence and our response to it. We invite you to continue the discussion in public.

By email: [email protected]

Re: Spam Lists

Dear Sirs,

This matter has been passed to the attention of the Marcus Evans legal department. It is our understanding that you have again added our domain marcusevansuk.com (“the Domain”) to your spam list despite our previous notification that this is a legitimate business domain.

You are mistaken in claiming that anything here is new. We have never removed any of the listings we have created for Marcus Evans related resources, so adding them “again” is technically an impossibility. The TXT records of all of our listings contain the date they were added. We do not recall any prior correspondence from you at any time. We have discussed, and will continue to discuss, the matter with your email service provider, Adestra, who are regrettably still allowing the use of purchased and scraped email lists.

All of our listees are real companies and real entities, quite like yourselves. We do not target phishing, virus, botnet or any other kind of “regular” spam. There are other entities in the anti-spam world to take care of the volume operations of the spam world. We address spam sent by real entities, mostly companies, to scientists, spam that appears to have been sent specifically because of the professional and academic endeavours of the recipients.

We can confirm that the Domain is used as a transactional business domain and therefore you are interfering with the legitimate business interests of Marcus Evans.

We can confirm that you are sending unsolicited bulk email.

We reject your notion that we would be interfering with anything. It is paramount that you understand that anybody using a DNSBL for making mail delivery decisions is doing so because they deliberately want to do so. We cannot insert ourselves in between the email transactions of random third parties, such as yourselves and, say, a university, nor would we wish to do so. Anybody using our advisory data is doing so of their own accord, without the need for permission from or agreement with ourselves.

Marcus Evans takes your interference very seriously and if you wish to avoid further action, we request that you provide the following undertakings to us by return email within the next 5 days:-

We continue to reject the notion of interference.

This response is being provided via a blog post on our website. We will not send you any email. We invite you to sign up on this website and provide your comments in public should you wish to respond.

1 That you or your agents or licensees, will immediately cease and desist listing the Domain on your spam list.
2 That you will not in future list any domain names associated with Marcus Evans as spam.

We note that your demands include absolutely nothing in return. You are not denying that you are sending spam, and you are not making any promises to stop sending spam.

Therefore we will respectfully have to deny your request in its entirety.

You should understand that we are not listing you out of spite or any other irrelevant reason. We list you because you send spam, and we will continue to do so until we have significant reason to believe that you have stopped. We will also continue to list any domains and IP addresses anywhere associated with sending Scientific Spam, whether associated with Marcus Evans or not. Marcus Evans will not get a free pass to spam from us, which is what you seem to be demanding.

Should you not comply with our demands, then Marcus Evans will take appropriate legal action including but not limited to making an application for an injunction in the courts to prevent any continued listing of the Domain as spam and also to recover damages for the losses resulting from your unlawful actions.

Scientific Spam DNSBL has reported your threats to a number of third parties, including the Information Commissioner’s Office. We believe this correspondence from you constitutes an intent to start a strategic lawsuit against public participation.

Scientific Spam DNSBL notes that Marcus Evans is engaged in the processing of inaccurate and out of date personal data in violation of the fourth principle of the Data Protection Act of 1998. Scientific Spam DNSBL has advised the ICO of the same.

Such proceedings will include a claim by Marcus Evans for the costs it has incurred and will incur in respect of enforcing a removal which it is entitled to expect you should have voluntarily complied with.

Please take notice that nothing in this letter constitutes a waiver of any rights or claims, or defenses that Marcus Evans may otherwise have against you or anyone acting in concert with you.

Yours faithfully,
Marcus Evans Legal Department
[signed, David Gilmore]

Suit yourselves.