Brian Haberstroh is a businessman in

New Hampshire New Hampshire is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec t ...

who once ran Distributed Mail Corporation, which distributed

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

used to forward

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

for other companies.

Spam accusations

Prior to 2005, Distributed Mail Corporation created a software application called "Virtual Mail Delivery Agent" to end-users which sends permission-based email to addresses supplied by Haberstroh's customers. The application allowed mass emails to get past email filters, but Haberstroh insisted it operated legally and in compliance with

CAN-SPAM The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 is a law passed in 2003 establishing the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail. The law requires the Federal Tra ...

. He claimed

Fortune 1000 The Fortune 1000 are the 1,000 largest American companies ranked by revenues, as compiled by the American business magazine ''Fortune''. It only includes companies which are incorporated or authorized to do business in the United States, and for ...

companies have licensed his service, though he has not named any of them apparently due to commercial confidentiality agreements. The application basically used the user's computer into a spam distributor of mass emails. Haberstroh said that all the recipients signed up to receive mail, yet The Spamhaus Project, claimed to have caught many messages from Haberstroh's system in "spam trap" mailboxes with unpublished addresses. Furthermore, when Linford tracked down several users, they claimed to know nothing of the software, indicating that it was installed as

malware Malware (a portmanteau for ''malicious software'') is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client, or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, depri ...

. Haberstroh denied Linford's accusations and has repeatedly attempted to have Linford's Spamhaus service correct the record. Spamhaus took him off their list of known spammers in 2007.

Legal case

In 2005, Haberstroh sued one of the recipients of his messages,

Jay Stuler A jay is a member of a number of species of medium-sized, usually colorful and noisy, passerine birds in the Crow family, Corvidae. The evolutionary relationships between the jays and the magpies are rather complex. For example, the Eurasian ...

Columbus, Ohio Columbus () is the state capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Ohio. With a 2020 census population of 905,748, it is the 14th-most populous city in the U.S., the second-most populous city in the Midwest, after Chicago, and t ...

. Stuler complained to Haberstroh's ISP in 2003 after being inundated with spam from Haberstroh's companies, resulting in the companies' ISPs closing down Haberstroh's accounts. Haberstroh in turn sued him for preventing his companies from sending email and thereby causing "financial harm", as well as Stuler's allegedly

libel Defamation is the act of communicating to a third party false statements about a person, place or thing that results in damage to its reputation. It can be spoken (slander) or written (libel). It constitutes a tort or a crime. The legal defini ...

ing him as a "criminal". The lawsuit known as Atriks, LLC, Distributed Mail Corporation and Brian Haberstroh v. Jay Stuler, Hillsborough County North Superior Court, Docket No. 04-C-718 has been resolved and judgment has been entered for the Plaintiffs.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Haberstroh, Brian Living people Year of birth missing (living people)