EarthLink Is Sued by Holder of Anti-Spam PatentsBy SAUL HANSELL
 Silicon Valley start-up yesterday sued EarthLink,
the big Internet service provider, saying that EarthLink's latest technology
to block unwanted e-mail marketing, or spam, violates two of the start-up's
patents. The plaintiff, MailBlocks, introduced an e-mail service in
March that shows users mail only from senders whom they approve or who can
show that they are people and not automated senders. MailBlocks was started
by Phillip Y. Goldman, a founder of WebTV.
MailBlocks, which is based in Los Altos, Calif., has been granted two patents
related to its method of verifying senders, a technology called challenge
response. The company charges $9.95 a year for the service. EarthLink
has said it will offer its customers a free challenge-response system, under
the name SpamBlocker, at the end of this month. Several other companies are
starting to offer similar approaches. MailBlocks, in fact, had already
filed suit against three companies — Spam Arrest of Seattle, DigiPortal Software
of Sanford, Fla., and MailFrontier of Palo Alto, Calif. Mr. Goldman
said that MailBlocks tried to license its patents to EarthLink as well but
was rebuffed. Yesterday it filed suit in federal court in the central district
of California, charging that EarthLink's system violates MailBlocks' patents
and asking the court to move quickly to block its release. "They are in violation of our patents and should not be allowed to proceed," Mr. Goldman said.
Jerry Grasso, EarthLink's director of corporate communications, said the
company could not comment because it had not seen the suit. In a
suit filed by EarthLink, a federal judge in Atlanta awarded the company $16.4
million in damages yesterday from Howard Carmack, a Buffalo resident, and
ordered him to stop sending spam through EarthLink. The company had accused
Mr. Carmack of fraudulently opening 343 accounts from which he sent a million
pieces of spam a day. Spam has become a hot issue for Internet users
because the volume of unsolicited marketing messages is increasing by 50
percent a month according to some e-mail providers. Start-ups, like MailBlocks,
see a booming market among consumers frustrated by spam. And e-mail providers
like Yahoo, America Online and EarthLink are hoping that spam-fighting technology will help them attract and retain customers.
Until now, most e-mail providers have focused on developing systems that
try to identify and block spam automatically, based on the sender address
or key words in the text. This approach reduces but does not eliminate spam
because spammers are becoming adept at obscuring their messages to get through
the filters. Another approach — offered as an option by America Online and Microsoft
— lets users see messages sent only by people already in their address books.
This eliminates nearly all spam, but it often also blocks legitimate e-mail
messages from senders who may not yet be in a user's address books.
Challenge-response systems are meant to offer a way to allow users to see
legitimate mail from new senders. When an e-mail message arrives from someone
not on the recipient's approved list, the MailBlocks system automatically
replies with a message of its own. The original sender must then reply by
typing a nine-digit number from an image on the e-mail message that is clear
to a human eye but difficult for a computer to discern. Messages from any
sender who passes this test will then be delivered to the recipient's inbox.
All other mail is diverted to a junk mail folder the recipient can either
look at or ignore. EarthLink uses a slightly different method that
requires unrecognized senders to type their names and a brief message into
a Web page. E-mail experts say that challenge-response systems are promising,
but they need fine-tuning to make sure users can see machine-sent messages
that they want — like transaction confirmations and sale announcements from
stores they like.
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