sprint

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Our company has today had the legal department of Sprint in the USA threaten
us because we said we would write to their corporate customers regarding
Sprint's spam support policies and urging them to dump Sprint. We get a
large percentage of our spam from persistent spammers on Sprint. We've
reported them to abuse but they've never been closed down. The spam
continues.

The Sprint lawyer said that our claims that they continue to host spammers
in breach of their AUP were untrue and that they would take whatever legal
action possible against us. We're not worried since everything we say is
true and Spamhaus bears this out (great site BTW).

The saddest part is that after getting zero response or action for any
complaint sent to the Sprint abuse address, we decided to send each spam
report to every email address (including press contacts and
executive-offices) we could get off the Sprint site. All of a sudden we've
had real people contacting us, even if it is only because we've annoyed
them.

I know this kind of thing isn't be the answer to spam (more email, etc.),
but it has produced a couple of phone calls and a crappy threatening letter
from Sprint's legal department and that's more than a year's worth of abuse
complaints has achieved. And we would only consider it reasonable to take
such action when it is against spammers who have not been closed down
despite numerious abuse reports. At least we know these emails are getting
through to real people and not just being discarded. And sadly, if Sprint
employees start to have to sift through this kind of stuff, they might do
something about it.

We have written back to the legal department today asking for clarification
on why the sites we reported are still live despite their AUP. I don't
expect an explanation, they will ignore it or fudge the issue. Bottom line
is, you can see exactly what Sprint are up to on Spamhaus... and if it's
true, you can't sue.


Paul Gay
Director
Cactusoft Ltd.