Is Dan Balsam a Menace or a Hero? Anti-Spam Crusader Defends Accusations and Gives Advice to the Industry
Email marketers called him a shakedown artist. California's appeals court ended up agreeing with him.
To email marketers in 2010, Daniel Balsam was the most annoying man in California. To people who hated spam, he was the only one doing anything about it. The honest answer to this headline's question is that he was both, depending on which inbox you were standing in.
Who he is
Balsam started suing spammers in 2002 in small claims court, a marketing professional angry about breast-enlargement emails. He went to law school, graduating from UC Hastings in 2008, and while there helped draft a bill to strengthen California's anti-spam law, which the governor vetoed. He runs a site called Dan Hates Spam and has reported more than $1 million in judgments, often around $1,000 per email.
The accusations
Some defendants who settled with him later sued him, including ValueClick and Bloosky Interactive, alleging he broke confidentiality or non-disparagement terms. He called those suits retaliation. Marketing lawyers who faced him in court criticized his tactics publicly.
The ruling
In Balsam v. Trancos, a trial court awarded $7,000 for seven emails plus about $81,900 in attorneys' fees under California's anti-spam statute. On February 24, 2012, the Court of Appeal affirmed. It held that emails sent from nonsense, privacy-protected domains naming a nonexistent company tied to a PO box were not traceable to the real sender, and that federal CAN-SPAM did not preempt claims about falsity or deception.
How it aged
In 2014 another California appeals court narrowed Trancos, holding the sender's name does not have to appear in the From line if the email body identifies the sender. Trancos is still a leading California case on sender identity. The advice that came out of all of it is the advice Balsam was giving in 2010: say who you are. Marketers who did that rarely met him.
This page rebuilds a December 2010 IndustryPace post whose original text is not available. Facts come from Eric Goldman's Technology and Marketing Law Blog, the California Court of Appeal's 2012 Trancos opinion and later case law, and public profiles of Balsam. Claims against Balsam by defendants are their allegations. Troutman Amin, a TCPA and marketing-law firm, underwrites some of the author's ADOTAT work.