It's not the court's job to favour the person who asked for the restraining order, beyond issuing it in the first place and enforcing it afterwards. Enforcement is a matter of justice, not a matter of taking sides, and if the person accused of breaking the restraining order did not wilfully do so then a punishment would, in my view, be unjust.
Since we're at risk of talking past each other, my context here is that I often seem to receive email from LinkedIn, Twitter, Google etc. reminding me that people those services believe to be my friends have performed some activity or other, and they're just desperate for me to join them. In some cases I barely know these people beyond having had some interaction with them in the past which the social network never manages to forget, or they actually are friends who would be perfectly capable of telling me about the service in question directly and would never spam me in such an obvious way. Ergo I can conclude that these emails do not result from some intentional action on the part of the individuals named in them, even though the social network in question very much wants me to believe that they do (as I am deemed to be more likely to open and respond to the mail if I believe this). A common pattern is to send out mails along the lines of "You haven't spoken to X much recently, they miss you!" in an effort to get you to log in to the network again, which is obviously pretty fucking terrible in the case of a restraining order. There are a bunch of examples of this kind of thing here: http://microformats.org/wiki/social_network_anti-patterns
So, my prior experience would appear to corroborate the version of events given in the OP, viz. social networks sending mails which claim to be from individuals who have no knowledge of the mails themselves. Obviously this creates a nasty legal situation - Google cannot have violated the restraining order because they were never under a restraining order in the first place, but then it seems unjust to say that the alleged violator did so either, because he did not actually send the offending mail or even know of its existence. I suppose the matter hinges on whether or not he could or should have known, and in that case whether he could have done anything about it. It's also problematic in other ways. Say you were to take out a restraining order against me, such that I am no longer allowed to reply to your comments on HN or seek to engage you in any way, and I comply. At some future point HN decides to start sending out spam mails to get people to post more often, and you receive one implying that I, having not spoken to you for some time, wish to engage you in discussion (say, using the conversation we're having right now as evidence of the fact that we've enjoyed interesting discussions in the past). Would that violate the order? My instinct says not, especially as I could never have known the consequences when conducting this conversation, just as I could not know the consequences (viz. spam emails) when adding someone to my Gmail contact list.
Since we're at risk of talking past each other, my context here is that I often seem to receive email from LinkedIn, Twitter, Google etc. reminding me that people those services believe to be my friends have performed some activity or other, and they're just desperate for me to join them. In some cases I barely know these people beyond having had some interaction with them in the past which the social network never manages to forget, or they actually are friends who would be perfectly capable of telling me about the service in question directly and would never spam me in such an obvious way. Ergo I can conclude that these emails do not result from some intentional action on the part of the individuals named in them, even though the social network in question very much wants me to believe that they do (as I am deemed to be more likely to open and respond to the mail if I believe this). A common pattern is to send out mails along the lines of "You haven't spoken to X much recently, they miss you!" in an effort to get you to log in to the network again, which is obviously pretty fucking terrible in the case of a restraining order. There are a bunch of examples of this kind of thing here: http://microformats.org/wiki/social_network_anti-patterns
So, my prior experience would appear to corroborate the version of events given in the OP, viz. social networks sending mails which claim to be from individuals who have no knowledge of the mails themselves. Obviously this creates a nasty legal situation - Google cannot have violated the restraining order because they were never under a restraining order in the first place, but then it seems unjust to say that the alleged violator did so either, because he did not actually send the offending mail or even know of its existence. I suppose the matter hinges on whether or not he could or should have known, and in that case whether he could have done anything about it. It's also problematic in other ways. Say you were to take out a restraining order against me, such that I am no longer allowed to reply to your comments on HN or seek to engage you in any way, and I comply. At some future point HN decides to start sending out spam mails to get people to post more often, and you receive one implying that I, having not spoken to you for some time, wish to engage you in discussion (say, using the conversation we're having right now as evidence of the fact that we've enjoyed interesting discussions in the past). Would that violate the order? My instinct says not, especially as I could never have known the consequences when conducting this conversation, just as I could not know the consequences (viz. spam emails) when adding someone to my Gmail contact list.