In the American legal system, if somebody spends the money to take the time to have their lawyer hand craft and send me a letter about something such as this, I'm going to take it as a threat whether or not it specifically contains one.
The implication is that if you do not do whatever is demanded in the letter, the next step will be the client of said lawyer escalating the situation to paying their lawyer to actually sue you.
I mean, not really. In the world of companies talking to other companies lawyers are involved all the time. In some scenarios (real estate transactions, or M&A, for example) it would just be completely routine for two companies on exceedingly good terms to communicate back and forth via attorneys.
Your main premise seems to be that the recipient should take all this very personally. But it’s not personal, these are businesses, discussing a business related topic.
The VAST majority of business to business communications that involve attorneys don’t go anywhere near an actual filed lawsuit.
An intentionally initiated transaction where everyone already knows each other, and knows in advance that lawyers will be involved (as you say, m&a, real estate, etc) is a very different thing than receiving a demand letter from a previously unknown party out of the blue.
Like I said in my original reply here, we are talking about sending threats to third-party isps, with which the originator of the smtp traffic has no existing business or contractual relationship.
I made all kinds of good faith efforts personally to contact someone at AT&T through their forms and phone numbers, without ever even speaking to anyone who could resolve the problem if they wanted to. Lacking any other way to get through to them, legal seemed like the only recourse.
I would think that if you were the ISP owner blocking our mail to your customer, a single phone call from the customer or from us would convince you that our IPs were not a spam threat. That's certainly the way I prefer to deal with anything. But when dealing with something as monolithic and totally deaf as AT&T, lawyers were the only way.
I would think an attorney wouldn’t get involved until other avenues were exhausted. As alluded to in the comment. If it’s out of the blue, check your spam folder.
Yes that’s the idea. They’ve spent a bit of money to make a sincere and well-founded request that will cause you to consult your own lawyer who will explain to you why you’re probably doing something wrong and need to do what the letter asks of you.
The fact that you would automatically react in this way is itself a reason to send it to the lawyers and have it go through a different department and chain of command.
Make it a legal and business decision instead of a technical one. And find an audience that knows the practical benefits of quick resolutions to reasonable requests.
And I say this as a person that would likely respond in a similar punitive and/or principled way to what you described upthread. Which is exactly why I leave it to the lawyers.
>> Make it a legal and business decision instead of a technical one.
I'd go further and say that choosing to unblock some IP addresses out of a block you don't like is always going to be a business decision. The whole rationale for blocking in the first place was that a sender is untrustworthy.
Untrustworthy senders generally don't have a team of lawyers, and if they do (and they're actually sending spam) you can show what spam they sent and keep them blocked.
All the legal letter does is force someone who's otherwise too busy to look at this particular case for the 5 seconds it takes to determine that it's not a threat. Sad to say that being head of IT for a company for a decade doesn't get you the same level of respect; it might if they even bothered to open your email, but there's something about postal and legal letterhead.
But lawyers don’t cost nearly as much outside the US. We moved from the US to the NL a few years ago. Legal representation is pennies compared to the US. So just because it’s expensive where you are, doesn’t mean it is everywhere else.
It doesn’t mean they are thinking to sue you. Not even close. When you actually get served, that’s when they’re thinking about it, because actually serving you is a few bits of paper and requires a few brain cells. Sending you what amounts to a form letter? No brain cells required.
The implication is that if you do not do whatever is demanded in the letter, the next step will be the client of said lawyer escalating the situation to paying their lawyer to actually sue you.