Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

The Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case-Western has an enthusiastic publicist.

To promote a new blog Case-Western are running, the publicist compiled a list of law professor emails, put them into mailing list software, and sent out a long email…that amounts to spam. Every colleague I’ve asked so far seems to have received it — it didn’t, for example, just go to bloggers (who might, I suppose, be considered fair game for such things). Like many spams, it came from mailing list software, described itself as a mailing list. Like all mail from well-behaved mailing lists, it included both header and text information about how to get off the mailing list.

Trouble is, smart users know you should never click on the opt-out info, it just encourages the spammers.

I wonder if the very fine people associated with this project — which I am purposefully not naming or linking to in order to spare them the shame, and especially to avoid creating another link that could be cited as a success metric — are aware of the ill will likely to be created by this form of promotion.