Every email client on the market offers roughly the same response to spam: move it to a folder, add the sender to a blocklist, and hope the algorithm catches the next one. The problem is that spam doesn’t slow down because someone clicked “Mark as Junk.” Spammers face no real consequences for what they do.
We think that should change.
The Legal Angle That’s Been Missing
In many jurisdictions — the EU under GDPR, the US under CAN-SPAM, and several others under their own anti-spam statutes — illegal commercial email exposes senders to real financial liability. Penalties can reach thousands of dollars per message. The problem has never been the law; it’s been the friction of actually using it.
Filing an anti-spam complaint typically requires identifying the right law, collecting and preserving the relevant email headers, writing a formal complaint, finding the appropriate authority or legal partner to file with, and then doing it all again for the next message. Most people give up long before that.
cji.email’s “Sue” function automates the collection and submission side of this process.
How It Works
When you flag an email as potentially illegal spam, cji.email goes to work on the evidence:
Header extraction and analysis. The Rust backend parses the raw message headers — Received: chains, Message-ID, X-Mailer, X-Originating-IP — and extracts the routing trail the email took to reach you. This trace is preserved in its original, unmodified form, which matters for evidentiary purposes.
Sender infrastructure identification. Using the extracted IP addresses and domain information, cji.email identifies the sending infrastructure: the IP block, the registrar, the hosting provider, and whether the domain appears in known abuse databases.
Report compilation. All of this is assembled into a structured report formatted for the legal submission workflow: the raw headers, the extracted data, the applicable legal grounds, and a summary of what was sent and when.
Legal partner submission. cji.email integrates with legal service providers who specialize in anti-spam enforcement. Your compiled report is submitted directly to them. They evaluate the claim and — where viable — pursue it on your behalf, often on a contingency basis.
Why “Sue” and Not Just “Report”
There are already tools for reporting spam to AbuseIPDB, to registrars, to network providers. We support those too (see our Automated Abuse Reporting feature). But reporting to technical databases changes the conditions for future spam; it doesn’t address what was already sent to you.
The “Sue” function is specifically oriented toward cases where spam was not just annoying but legally actionable — where the sender violated opt-in requirements, lacked a physical address, used a deceptive subject line, or sent commercial messages without a valid unsubscribe mechanism. These are the cases where legal remedy is actually available.
What You Need to Do
The workflow from your side is minimal:
- Open the spam message in cji.email.
- Click Sue in the message actions.
- Review the automatically compiled report and confirm the submission.
The rest — follow-up with the legal partner, case progression — happens outside the client. cji.email handles the technical extraction and handoff. What you do with it from there is up to you and your chosen legal partner.
The Broader Effect
Individual complaints, even small ones, impose operational costs on spammers. When filing a complaint takes thirty seconds instead of thirty minutes, more people file them. More complaints mean higher risk for senders of illegal mail, which means higher friction for the spam industry overall.
We’re not under any illusion that one feature ends spam. But we do believe that making legal accountability accessible — rather than reserved for people with the time and expertise to pursue it — shifts the calculus in a useful direction.
The inbox should belong to you, and that includes the right to push back when someone violates it.