Joi Ito posted an apology to people in his address book after he signed up to sms.ac and then watched it pull in his MSN Messenger list and spam his friends with invitations. Today he posted an email he received from Kevin B Jones of sms.ac. They appear to be objecting to his use of the phrase sms.ac on his web site, but there are no objections to being called spammers. No wonder, as their behaviour is slimy. Every month someone on my MSN list seems to sign up to the service and my IM email address gets sent a series of emails, which grow more and more shrill in their request for me to sign up. I've tried emailing them to ask how I completely opt-out of their invitations, I never received a reply and the invitation spams continued to arrive. The invitations are hard to block as they are sent using the from address of the person who signed up and hotmail, the address I use for IM, won't allow you to block by originating IP.

I don't know if it's laughable or pathetic that they believe that using the words sms.as is breaking their trademark and that they can force removal of any pages which use the term. Will they be suing google, msn et al.