The company, which operates a subscriber based service designed to prevent it's users from receiving spam, uses a "challenge-response" method to sort legitimate mail from unwelcome and unsolicited email advertisements. Every time a SpamArrest customer is emailed, a message is sent back to the sender asking them to verify themselves before the message will be sent through to the intended recipient.
SpamArrest have been harvesting the email addresses of users sending email to their clients, and then sending advertisements for their service to those addresses.
Robert Pickup, founder and CEO of Melbourne based anti-spam company BlueBottle Systems, who also operate a challenge-response subscriber service, has branded the practice as "ridiculous."
"How ironic, spamming by the anti-spamming community," he said.
Pickup says that the practice is likely to damage the reputation of companies like his, and the anti-spam community as a whole.
"It damages our credibility. Their actions affect me - they affect all of us," he said.
"What really concerns me most about what they are doing is that I've sent emails to SpamArrest customers and they've kept my address without my consent," he added.
It's because of the harvesting of email addresses without consent that SpamArrest may have found themselves on the wrong end of the Australian Privacy Act, according to IT law specialist Erhan Karabardak, of Melbourne's Jerrard and Stuk Lawyers.
"This practice may constitute a breach of the Australian privacy legislation despite the fact that the company is resident in the United States," he said.
Karabardak says that it's possible for a company operating outside of Australia to breach the act ".on the basis that the practice relates to the personal information of an Australian citizen or resident."
Under the Act, email addresses may be regarded as personal information that cannot legally be harvested and used for marketing purposes without the prior consent of the owner of that address.
The SpamArrest "promotion" has attracted widespread criticism from online anti-spam groups such as samspade.org, who claim a statement sent to them by SpamArrest ".diverges wildly from reality."
In the statement, SpamArrest said that they ".complied with both our own privacy policy, as well as industry-accepted rules for sending email." They went on to describe themselves as a ".legitimate spam prevention service".
They also said that the only way for recipients of the advertisement to get off their list is to follow the opt-out link.
"...people fear the opt-out link, but I want to reassure you and your readers that clicking on this link is 1. safe, and 2. the only sure way to remove your address from receiving future spam arrest promotions".
After being under heavy fire from the entire *legitimate* anti-spam community as well probably every newsletter publisher they decided to put an apology on their website.
It's a vague and pathetic apology, and they still haven't changed their privacy policy, so according to themselves it is still legal for them to spam anyone communicating with their customers.
Which newsletter publisher in their right mind would verify themselves upon a request from spamarrest? - probably very few, which means that a lot of legitimate email will go undelivered.