The manager of a popular blacklist used to block spam was hit with a multimillion-dollar judgement on Wednesday, but the order may not be enforceable.
The US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois has ordered Spamhaus to pay $11,715,000 in damages to e360insight and its chief, David Linhardt, who had sued the UK-based organisation earlier this year over illegal blacklisting.
The court also barred Spamhaus from causing any email sent by e360insight or Linhardt to be "blocked, delayed, altered, or interrupted in any way" and ordered Spamhaus to publish an apology stating that Linhardt and his company are not spammers, according to a copy of the order.
"This ruling confirms e360insight's position that Spamhaus.org is a fanatical, vigilante organisation that operates in the United States with blatant disregard for US law," Linhardt wrote in an email to ZDNet UK’s sister site, CNET News.com, on Thursday.
But Spamhaus is unfazed by the ruling. In a statement on its Web site, it dismissed the judgment as invalid and charges that the court was "bamboozled by spammers", Spamhaus didn't mount a defence in the case; the ruling was a default judgment in absence of counterarguments.
"Default judgments obtained in US county, state or federal courts have no validity in the UK and can not be enforced under the British legal system," Spamhaus said on its Web site. "As spamming is illegal in the UK, an Illinois court ordering a British organisation to stop blocking incoming Illinois spam in Britain goes contrary to UK law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place."
Linhardt and his company are indeed spammers and remain on the Spamhaus blocklist, the organisation said. Posting a note that e360insignt was inaccurately labelled as a spammer would be a lie, Spamhaus said. If Linhardt wants a ruling that counts, he needs to refile his case in the UK, according to Spamhaus.
The Spamhaus blocklist is a database of verified spam sources that is supplied at no cost to help email administrators clean incoming email streams. Spam accounts for about 75 percent of all email, and the Spamhaus list is one of the most popular such blacklists to help cleanse email.
"The Spamhaus guys are good guys and they are doing the right thing. It is a pity that the court system in the US can be abused in such a fashion as it is," said Dean Drako, the chief executive of Barracuda Networks, a maker of antispam appliances. Barracuda offers the Spamhaus list in its appliances.
Spammers often threaten with lawsuits, but don't often follow through, Drako said. Senders of junk mail fight blacklists because they hurt their business. "If a spammer gets listed, less spam gets through and their revenue is related to the amount of spam that gets read," Drako said.
Like Spamhaus, Drako does not expect the Illinois judgment to have any effect in the fight against spam. "I don't think the lawsuit actually means anything," he said.
Talkback
It's just like a spammer to abuse the U.S. legal system. Spamhaus and Steve Linford provide a valuable service in the war against spam and these turkeys know it. However, as others have said, a default judgment in a U.S. court has zero impact to a citizen of the U.K. What amazes me is the Judge allowed the case to proceed in the first place.
The judge was probably a yankee and wanted to get us back for killing his ancestors in the civil wars!!
I think that giving a judgement against an antispam or antivirus or spyware company is stupid, much in the same way as suing a hospital. That should be outlawed too.
They are trying to help people get better and have better lives, stopping spam is a good way to do that, thanks to this lawsuit i know of the spamming company and i know to keep away!
Your pointless exercise has allowed people to know who spams.
Spamhaus Internet terrorists.
Becoming what you oppose
Editorial by Dave Hayes
Many folks have asked me why I stopped "contributing" to the everlasting debates in NANA (news.admin.net-abuse.*). I generally respond with something along the lines of "I don't wish to become that which I oppose". Indeed, recently I've "plonked" several entities (among them the terrorists known as "spamhaus" and "spews") simply because I no longer wish to beat my head against the stone wall of ignorance.
Terrorists? Yes that's right. One definition of "terrorism" is "attacking innocents in the name of your cause". Nowhere is this more ironic and extreme than in the deeds of my old nemesi, the anti-spammer zealotry collective, some of whom are now known as spamhaus and spews. The terrorism they practice is implemented in the form of "mail blacklists".
Blacklists are not a new notion. In the 1950's, the infamous McCarthy blacklists contained names of "possible communists", which ultimately led us to a more sterile culture.
The social costs of what came to be called McCarthyism have yet to be computed. By conferring its prestige on the red hunt, the state did more than bring misery to the lives of hundreds of thousands of Communists, former Communists, fellow travelers, and unlucky liberals. It weakened American culture and it weakened itself. ---Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980)
Modern internet technology has created our own version(s) of social blacklists. Many anti-spam zealots have turned to this method for freeing their mailboxes from spam. Simply expressed, these organizations maintain databases which are supposed to contain the IP addresses of known spammers. They then provide these databases to various electronic mail servers, so that the servers can reject email based on what's in these databases.
The bottom line is, if the machine that sends your email is on this list, a number of mail servers will automatically reject all email from your server.
If (and only if) they restricted these blacklists to actual spammers, I doubt very seriously that I would have problem with this practice. If we could trust human beings to maintain a logical and calm viewpoint about life, I doubt that I would have a problem with these blacklists. Unfortunately we cannot trust these things in either case.
Fact: Spamhaus and spews have added innocent IP blocks to their blacklists.
The anti-spammer idealotry goes like this: "Anyone who gets service from a network friendly to spammers is supporting the spammers and therefore our enemy." (The friend of my enemy is my enemy too?)
So here's how this goes. Once a network provider is branded "a communist"...er excuse me..."a spammer", ALL of their IP ranges are blocked. Typically a network provider is providing services for smaller service providers, many of whom would never and have never engaged in spamming of any kind. No notice is really given on these blacklisting events, rather you find out when mail starts bouncing to some destination. Usually an end customer is the first to notice, and that customers is directed by the bounce to complain to...their own ISP!
In essence, the customer is tricked into presenting the terrorist anti-spam agenda to the ISP. The ISP turns around and finds out that their provider (or provider's provider) is what the anti-spam zealots want "silenced". Until that target complies with their arbitrary agenda (usually of the form "stop spamming", but this is not always true...see below), everyone else has to suffer with electronic mail blocks.
What's wrong with this? Everything.
* First and foremost, the most often heard reason anti-spammers are so rabid about anti-spam is "it makes electronic mail unusable for average people". If this is true, then how does blocking innocent email help this situation? In fact, blacklisting innocents contributes to the problem. The hypocrisy here is so thick I doubt even a knife can cut it. * The di
Spamhaus Internet terrorists.
Becoming what you oppose
Editorial by Dave Hayes
Many folks have asked me why I stopped "contributing" to the everlasting debates in NANA (news.admin.net-abuse.*). I generally respond with something along the lines of "I don't wish to become that which I oppose". Indeed, recently I've "plonked" several entities (among them the terrorists known as "spamhaus" and "spews") simply because I no longer wish to beat my head against the stone wall of ignorance.
Terrorists? Yes that's right. One definition of "terrorism" is "attacking innocents in the name of your cause". Nowhere is this more ironic and extreme than in the deeds of my old nemesi, the anti-spammer zealotry collective, some of whom are now known as spamhaus and spews. The terrorism they practice is implemented in the form of "mail blacklists".
Blacklists are not a new notion. In the 1950's, the infamous McCarthy blacklists contained names of "possible communists", which ultimately led us to a more sterile culture.
The social costs of what came to be called McCarthyism have yet to be computed. By conferring its prestige on the red hunt, the state did more than bring misery to the lives of hundreds of thousands of Communists, former Communists, fellow travelers, and unlucky liberals. It weakened American culture and it weakened itself. ---Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980)
Modern internet technology has created our own version(s) of social blacklists. Many anti-spam zealots have turned to this method for freeing their mailboxes from spam. Simply expressed, these organizations maintain databases which are supposed to contain the IP addresses of known spammers. They then provide these databases to various electronic mail servers, so that the servers can reject email based on what's in these databases.
The bottom line is, if the machine that sends your email is on this list, a number of mail servers will automatically reject all email from your server.
If (and only if) they restricted these blacklists to actual spammers, I doubt very seriously that I would have problem with this practice. If we could trust human beings to maintain a logical and calm viewpoint about life, I doubt that I would have a problem with these blacklists. Unfortunately we cannot trust these things in either case.
Fact: Spamhaus and spews have added innocent IP blocks to their blacklists.
The anti-spammer idealotry goes like this: "Anyone who gets service from a network friendly to spammers is supporting the spammers and therefore our enemy." (The friend of my enemy is my enemy too?)
So here's how this goes. Once a network provider is branded "a communist"...er excuse me..."a spammer", ALL of their IP ranges are blocked. Typically a network provider is providing services for smaller service providers, many of whom would never and have never engaged in spamming of any kind. No notice is really given on these blacklisting events, rather you find out when mail starts bouncing to some destination. Usually an end customer is the first to notice, and that customers is directed by the bounce to complain to...their own ISP!
In essence, the customer is tricked into presenting the terrorist anti-spam agenda to the ISP. The ISP turns around and finds out that their provider (or provider's provider) is what the anti-spam zealots want "silenced". Until that target complies with their arbitrary agenda (usually of the form "stop spamming", but this is not always true...see below), everyone else has to suffer with electronic mail blocks.
What's wrong with this? Everything.
* First and foremost, the most often heard reason anti-spammers are so rabid about anti-spam is "it makes electronic mail unusable for average people". If this is true, then how does blocking innocent email help this situation? In fact, blacklisting innocents contributes to the problem. The hypocrisy here is so thick I doubt even a knife can cut it. * The di
At best, Spamhous provides a blunt instrument for dealing with spam. If what they determine to be "spam" passes through a server they are monitoring, that server is added to the blacklist. If the spam is not recognised as such, it evades detection. Spammers are becoming more and more sophisticated in the means they use to disguse mass mailings, such as random combinations of words as the sender and subject, and random sequences of words interspersed in the text. I'm increasingly seeing "words" like sVo9IzAddGsRpA. (Hint: just look at the capital letters.)
What is the real killer though is the way certain ISPs, such as NTL, use the Spamhaus database. Email which has a blacklisted host in the headers is silently ignored. Every such email, not just some. As a result, the email service becomes worthless as a reliable means of communication. There have been situations where one ISP (e.g. NTL) has decided to silently discard all emails from another (e.g. Wanadoo). At various times I have lost emails for extended periods from (among others) hotmail, yahoo, Oxford University and beeb.com. Despite this, NTL fail to ignore an average of 10 spam emails a day and put them in my spam folder, whilst a similar number are not detected at all, and end up in my Inbox.
hmmm. "the language used by "bill's" quoted article (no source, I note) seems very familar to spam we received on an abuse account yesterday, curiously also purporting to come from a "bill", this one at Yahoo. Yeah, right. It had as much dealings with a Yahoo server as my left testicle.
That mail was standard bully boy tactics, first saying join us in a class action lawsuit against SpamHaus, then saying 'you may be liable' if you don't. It also mentioned a different DNSBL, where the sending IP is actually listed!! But, we have to accept, because it was sent tto abuse account.
Funny, these pieces of knobcheese who send out mails like that don't go after MAPS or SpamCop, since they've got corporate resources and corporate lawyers behind them.
So a call to Trend or IronPort - maybe lend SpamHaus one of your lawyers now and again, should one of the scum-suckers try their tricks in a UK court.
Just a quick note that yes, bill does indeed sum up what happens much of the time. I had the misfortune recently of getting my emails to my own customers blocked, simply because someone with the same hosting company went and bought a list of 100,000 addresses and got our entire IP range blacklisted.
When we found out (after about a week and a half of our emails not getting through) we were pissed.
The big companies can afford to get their own dedicated servers and set aside resources for making sure that their emails are all verified and delivered successfully. But it's expensive, and it requires expertise that most of us smaller online businesses don't have and can't afford to hire.
Worse, even personal emails frequently fail to get through. If something is important, we never rely solely on email communication anymore. We can't. Spammers still flood our inboxes (maybe we should hire some of those guys?) but now legitimate mail gets filtered out. I'm not saying we should abandon filtering, but we clearly need something better than what we have.
you really must be poor if you cannot even afford 200 quid for a server and nothing for a copy of linux with sendmail!!
windows server 2003 comes with a simple mail server on it!