True, and furthermore, services like this (FB, G+, LI, etc.) have every incentive to escalate their involuntary contacts over time. Every once in a while they'll go too far too quickly and have to backtrack due to public outcry, but there won't be any outcry about the plight of alleged order-violators. In general you should expect every service that knows your name and any other person's contact info to send that person many messages on your behalf without your consent. It will be nice when the courts figure this out; I don't expect it to take them more than twenty years.
Eh, maybe. I can't really picture a law forbidding automated email that wouldn't have horrible consequences for most citizens. Perhaps the courts ought to just accept that the world changes and change along with it?
The world changes, but at the end of the day, unwanted, unsolicited contact is the same whether it's via e-mail, text message, phone call, fax, carrier pigeon, etc. The fact that technology makes it easier for companies like Facebook and Google to do stupid things like spam your contact list doesn't mean that courts should change unrelated rules as a result.
...unwanted, unsolicited contact is the same whether it's via...
You say that as if unsolicited communication is some kind of basic, elemental thing, like murder or robbery. In fact it is a deliberate exception to speech rights, which exception itself has plenty of exceptions. For instance, there doesn't seem to be much caselaw preventing junk mail, perhaps because that's the only thing keeping the USPS in operation. Keep in mind, too, that what courts may include in orders varies among jurisdictions.
One could certainly imagine a new law intended to encourage services that send automatic communications to be more careful about violating restraining orders. One could not imagine such a law actually succeeding in its stated purpose, nor could the imagination encompass such a law not having horrible follow-on effects. It's much more plausible to recall that courts may only use their injunction power to achieve equitable remedies, and that in a context of involuntary electronic messages there is nothing equitable about holding someone responsible for communications she did not create.
