Despite being for being sued for sending unsolicited and unwanted email advertisements in April of 2005 a division of Kraft Foods, Inc. (NYSE: KFT) called Gevalia is still failing to protect consumers from unsubscribe abuse. LashBack notified Kraft of this type of abuse in the past, but executives are still failing to take the steps necessary to protect consumers.  As a result of unsubscribing yesterday consumers received a Nigerian investment scam that they likely wouldn’t have ever received if they didn’t unsubscribe from Kraft.

Recent Example of Suppression List Abuse: http://www.lashback.com/unsub/ViolationReview.aspx?ViolationID=311094

The example above shows how LashBack placed a very unique seed email address on a Kraft controlled suppression list and then how we started to receive new messages sent to that seed yesterday (1.23.2006).  In total LashBack has tracked twenty five (25) cases of suppression list abuse and four (4) cases of Failure to Honor associated with Kraft’s online marketing activities. 

We’ve tried to communicate these issues to Kraft on several occasions, but so far no progress has been made.  Tell Kraft how you feel about them not protecting your email address from unsubscribe abuse by contacting them at the following:

Larry Baumann
Larry.baumann@kraft.com
914.425.2500

I am in shock at the number of states now pursuing child registries to ‘protect’ children from adult content in their inbox.  Utah and Michigan were the first to break into this arena with strong pressure from the commercial interests of Unspam.   Now other states are following suit with their own laws designed to ‘protect’ children from email of a sensitive nature, even after the FTC strongly urged against such legislation.  The reality of the situation is that these state legislators are being wooed by commercial interests into thinking that such laws will help children, but they could actually have the opposite effect – producing a list of email addresses belonging to children.  This list, in the hands of bad people, could produce terrible effects.   And while Unspam would likely deny this, any list cleansing process that takes a master list and subtracts out a sublist can easily be reversed engineered to determine what the sublist is.  In this case, the sublist is a list of children’s email address. 

So my message to state legislators is simple – stop taking a ‘me too’ attitude and think about the ramifications of this legislation.  I know you to think you are doing good and helping children.  But this well-intended concept will likely do more harm than good. It will place a huge burden on good companies that are trying to comply while the nasty companies keep sending their spam.  Also, it will lead to lawsuits against the state that will consume large quantities of taxpayer dollars (and I wouldn’t be surprised to see these laws overturned).  Let’s spend more energy fighting the bad guys, not causing problems for the good guys (and potentially children, as well).

Eric Castelli