Internet "e-mail marketer" e360insight has had a rough time of it in the courts. The company first came to the public's attention when it sued to try to knock spam blacklist provider Spamhaus off the Internet, an attempt that was ultimately thwarted. e360insight's latest attempts to further its business through the courts has now been dismissed, as a judge has ruled that Comcast's decision to filter e-mails sent by the company is perfectly legal.

The case centered on what has become an increasing fact of life for the Internet service business; over 90 percent of the mail that reaches Comcast's servers is spam, and the company filters out half a billion e-mails daily. Each of the filtered mails prompts a return mail to the sender, notifying them of Comcast's spam policies. e360insight sued to have this policy terminated, and asked for $500,000 compensation in addition to damages. They argued that they weren't actually a spammer, as they used opt-in/out mailing lists, making Comcast's filtering an unlawful interference with their business. The suit included a number of other claims, including the suggestion that Comcast's response e-mails constituted a denial-of-service attack.

Judge James Zagel of the US District Court of Northern Illinois found none of e360insight's arguments compelling. The key part of his decision was based on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, termed the "Good Samaritan provision." This provision explicitly protects any Internet service provider from liability for, "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected."

Judge Zagel's analysis seemed grounded in real-world experience. The second sentence of the decision notes that, "Some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call it [e360insight] a spammer." He also notes that the fact that Comcast's filtering software might make mistakes is precisely why Section 230 was crafted: "Congress, and, I think, everyone else who studied the issue understood that blocking software would probably block too much." Given that, the only way to find Comcast liable was to find that they did not act in good faith, and Zagel concluded that e360insight hadn't offered sufficient evidence to support such a finding.

The judge also dismissed the denial of service claim, suggesting that e360insight brought the problem on itself: "it is e360's choice to submit very large numbers of e-mails for transmission which, after the first Comcast block, it should have known of this possibility and been prepared for it."

Section 230 has been somewhat controversial, given that extreme interpretations of it could be used to justify either ISPs doing nothing about fraudulent materials flowing across their networks or to justify blocking protected speech. This decision shows that a reasonable reading of both the intent behind the law and the facts of the case can actually help ensure a less painful Internet experience.