I live and work in France. I have had a professional .com web address
for seven years. Three years ago, a bigger and well reknowned UK
company changed their trading name to the same as mine and registered
the same web address with a .co.uk suffix. However, someone in their
marketing department made a mistake and they printed all their
letterheads and company stationery with my .com address. Their staff
were under the impression that their company had a .com address and
thus issued hundreds of emails to all and sundry - including signing
up to daily pornographic images, newsletters, chat sites, and anything
else that requires a ?valid? email address.

I was suddenly overrun with thousands of spam messages, pornographic
images and I now receive on average 18000 (yes eighteen thousand) spam
messages per month.

I have had several conversations with their CEO and IT department over
the years and whilst they have of course modified their company
stationery,  their staff; their clients; and their suppliers are still
using a .com address. To make metters worse, their accounts department
in one office continue to send confidential information to the head
office in another town using the .com address.  They have no interest
in purchasing the .com domain.

My question is simple : what action can I take / do I have the right to take?

I don't know the answer to your question, but my guess is that there
is little to no case law on this point because it's such a new area. I
was going to suggest that you look to see if there were any relevant
cases or statutes governing a phone number (for example, if I print
your phone number in my ad in the phone book, causing you to get calls
for me, am I liable?).

I would also suggest that, before you do anything, you think about
what you *want* to get out of this. Do you want the UK company to pay
some sum of money to cover your costs of dealing with all their spam?
Send out some sort of letter to all their employees to ensure that it
doesn't continue? Pay for you to move to a new domain?

Just start kill filing anything that isn't going directly to your
email addresses. If it isn't defined as an address, bounce it, or send
it to /dev/null.

forge