---
title: "A $13.3M Default Judgment Dies Because a Process Email Hit Spam"
description: "An Illinois federal judge voided the award after finding the only notice a Chinese seller got was filtered into its junk folder"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-27T17:57:42Z
modified: 2026-10-27T18:43:06Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/a-13-3m-default-judgment-dies-because-a-process-email-hit-sp-acec89
language: en
tags: ["law", "spam", "default-judgment", "trademark", "email"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# A $13.3M Default Judgment Dies Because a Process Email Hit Spam

*An Illinois federal judge voided the award after finding the only notice a Chinese seller got was filtered into its junk folder*

By Luis Goa · October 27, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-13-3m-default-judgment-dies-because-a-process-email-hit-sp-acec89

## In brief

- An Illinois federal judge vacated a $13,335,764.46 default judgment against Chinese seller Omont on Oct. 16, 2026
- Service papers were sent by court-approved email and landed in Omont’s spam folder, the judge found
- Plaintiff Imagination Products holds only a supplemental trademark registration on Pantone Orange 021c for drain tools, which carries no presumption of validity
- The ruling cites a May 2026 Seventh Circuit decision, Kangol v. Hangzhou Silk, limiting email service on Chinese defendants under the Hague Convention
- More than $7 million in related default judgments against other sellers in the same case were left unexamined

A federal judge in the Northern District of Illinois vacated a $13,335,764.46 default judgment on October 16 after concluding that the defendant, a seller called Omont, never actually received notice of the lawsuit against it. The plaintiff, Imagination Products Corp., had served Omont by email with the court’s permission. Omont says the email landed in its spam folder and stayed there until a marketplace delisted its products months later.

Imagination Products makes the Drain Weasel, a hand-operated drain-clog tool, and holds what’s called a supplemental trademark registration on Pantone Orange 021c as applied to plumbing snakes. A supplemental registration is the US Patent and Trademark Office’s second-tier listing: it doesn’t require proof that a mark is inherently distinctive or has acquired secondary meaning, which is also why it carries no legal presumption that the mark is valid. Imagination Products sued Omont and other sellers, alleging their orange drain tools infringed that color as trade dress, as [Eric Goldman wrote on the Technology & Marketing Law Blog](https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2026/10/spam-filtered-email-service-unwinds-a-13m-default-judgment-imagination-products-v-omont.htm).

## How notice failed

This case is a cousin of what Goldman calls the SAD Scheme (Schedule A Defendants), a pattern of mass-defendant counterfeiting suits concentrated in the Northern District of Illinois, documented in his [Columbia Law Review Forum piece](https://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/November-2023-Forum-Goldman-final.pdf). In the typical version, a plaintiff sues dozens of anonymous overseas sellers on a sealed exhibit, wins an ex parte temporary restraining order, and has a marketplace freeze the defendants’ accounts before anyone can respond. The freeze itself functions as notice: a seller who finds its PayPal or Amazon account suddenly locked goes looking for why.

Imagination Products didn’t take that route. It sued Omont without a TRO and simply asked the court for permission to serve by email under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4(f)(3), which it got. With no account freeze to tip Omont off, the only notice it had was the email itself, which its spam filter intercepted. Omont says it first learned anything was wrong when the marketplace delisted some of its products in response to the default judgment, went digging through its own email account, found the service email sitting in spam, and moved to vacate.

**How a $13.3m judgment went unopposed** Sequence of events in Imagination Products Corp. v. ComingHere Direct

| From | To | How |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Suit filed, no TRO sought | Court allows email service *(Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(f)(3))* |  |
| Court allows email service *(Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(f)(3))* | Service email sent to Omont |  |
| Service email sent to Omont | Filtered to spam folder |  |
| Filtered to spam folder | No response filed |  |
| No response filed | $13.3m default judgment entered |  |
| $13.3m default judgment entered | Marketplace delists Omont listings |  |
| Marketplace delists Omont listings | Omont finds email, moves to vacate |  |
| Omont finds email, moves to vacate | Judgment vacated, Oct. 16, 2026 |  |

Based on [N.D. Ill. order, Oct. 16, 2026, as reported by Eric Goldman](https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2026/10/spam-filtered-email-service-unwinds-a-13m-default-judgment-imagination-products-v-omont.htm)

The court’s reasoning was blunt about what spam filters do for a living. “It is unsurprising that an email from an unknown foreign attorney would end up in defendant’s spam folder,” the judge wrote, adding that absent an injunction, Omont had no way to learn of the suit “other than meticulously monitoring its spam folder,” and that the resulting lack of notice counted as “inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect” under the rule governing relief from judgment.

## A Seventh Circuit ruling the court didn’t fully apply

The order also leaned on *Kangol LLC v. Hangzhou Chuanyue Silk Import & Export Co.*, No. 25-2205, decided by the Seventh Circuit on May 29, 2026. That ruling held that when the Hague Service Convention applies to a defendant, it “provides the permissible means of service and excludes all others,” and that the treaty authorizes no provision for serving defendants in China by email, as the [opinion itself states](https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/10866264/kangol-llc-v-hangzhou-chuanyue-silk-import-export-co-ltd/). But Kangol first requires a court to determine whether the Convention applies at all, a threshold question that turns on whether the defendant’s address is knowable. The Seventh Circuit remanded Kangol for exactly that finding rather than ruling service invalid outright. The Illinois court cited Kangol for the proposition that email service in China is barred, without first working through that threshold step, Goldman noted.

## The number that doesn’t matter, and the one that might

The order frames the problem partly as a matter of scale, stating that the court “cannot sustain such a significant award” against a defendant who wasn’t properly served. That framing is beside the point: a court can’t sustain any damages award, $1 or $13 million, against a defendant lacking proper service. The defect is a due-process failure, not a rounding error.

> The default judgment order awards plaintiff $13,335,764.46 in damages from defendant. The court cannot sustain such a significant award on a default judgment entered against a defendant who was not properly served.

With Omont now able to argue its side, the underlying trademark claim looks weaker than the unopposed judgment suggested. The court found Omont has “a meritorious defense” because it disputes that the orange trade dress is “inherently distinctive or has acquired secondary meaning.” Under *Qualitex Co. v. Jacobson Products Co.*, 514 U.S. 159 (1995), a single color can function as a trademark, but only once it has acquired secondary meaning, consumers associating that color specifically with one source. A supplemental registration, by design, makes no finding on that question. The same doctrinal gap that let a $13 million judgment issue by default was sitting in the record the whole time; it just took an adversary to point at it.

## What happens to the rest of the defendants

Omont was not the only defendant. Related default judgments in the same case total more than $7 million against other sellers, and nothing in the October 16 order revisits them, even though a trade dress claim found wanting against Omont would undercut the claim against everyone else sued over the same orange hue. Nor did the court ask whether the other defendants were served by the same email method and are sitting on the same defect. If they were, the same spam-folder logic that freed Omont should free them too, but someone has to raise it first, and defaulted defendants by definition aren’t in court to raise anything.

That asymmetry is the actual story here, not the dollar figure. A court evaluating a default motion sees only the plaintiff’s side, filed by lawyers for the plaintiff, uncontested by anyone, and routinely approved by judges managing dockets that may carry thousands of nearly identical SAD Scheme filings a year in the Northern District of Illinois alone, per Goldman’s accounting. Every one of those judgments rests on a notice chain that includes, somewhere, an unmonitored inbox. The open question isn’t whether Imagination Products eventually proves its color claim. It’s how many of the other default judgments issued this way, in this court and others, are resting on an email nobody ever opened.

## See also

- [Seventh Circuit Limits Email Service on Foreign Defendants](https://tlblog.org/seventh-circuit-limits-email-service-on-foreign-defendants/) — tlblog.org · Transnational Litigation Blog's analysis of the Kangol ruling
- [SAD scheme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAD_scheme) — en.wikipedia.org · Background on the Schedule A Defendants litigation pattern
- [Qualitex Co. v. Jacobson Products Co., 514 U.S. 159 (1995)](https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/US/514/514.US.159.93-1577.html) — law.resource.org · The Supreme Court ruling establishing when a single color can be trademarked