Comcast countersues e360 Insight

Comcast has filed counter-charges against e-commerce firm e360Insight, which is currently suing Comcast for allegedly blocking its e-mails.

The Comcast complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois last week, claims that Dave Lindhardt, president of e360Insight, has allegedly sent spam to Comcast subscribers. Lindhardt would not comment on these allegations against his firm, but would comment on his own suit against Comcast.

“We filed the complaint after Comcast would not stop blocking communications that our customers specifically asked for,” Lindhardt said. “These include double opt-in messages, order confirmations and shipment information. Our customers were complaining and Comcast was not getting back to us about releasing the block.”

Comcast did not return calls for comment before this article went to print.

E360Insight has been involved in other such lawsuits in the past. In September 2006, Lindhardt won a case, which was then overturned, against UK-based spam-filtering firm Spamhaus, which blacklisted e360. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois charged Spamhaus with incorrectly blacklisting e360Insight's e-mails to consumers and ordered the spam blocker to pay $11.7 million in damages to e360Insight. In response, Steve Linford, CEO of Spamhaus, filed an order to overturn the case, which was overturned in September 2007.

Lindhardt also sued a number of individuals who referred to him as a “spammer” in Usenet newsgroups discussion boards.