Spammers Land Optusnet On spews.org Blacklist

downundarob writes: "In Australia there are essentially only two major backbone suppliers; eventually all traffic either rides on Telstra (Part govt. owned) or OptusNet (part of C&W Optus). According to this page OptusNet has gotten itself on spews.com blacklist, potentially causing issues for a large percentage of Australian Internet users." Update: 09/30 12:01 GMT by T :DanielS writes: "Looks like Optus did indeed back down; according to the SPEWS listing & delisting info page, Optus were removed after shutting down the DNS service."

Comments

A bit over the top

[term0r]

Mr Barry said Optus had been fooled by a simple ruse as the spam gang split its operations, setting up the computer with sites to be spammed in the US and hosting the domain name server at Optus.

It seems that the server running on the Optus network is only acting as a Domain server for the spamming. I would hope if this is the case, that the server actually doing the Spamming, which is in the states, has also been black listed.

Plus, as the article says, running a nameserver is not against the Terms and Conditions of Optus, so there is little they can do about this.
Anti-Spam people often seem to be so wrapped up in their cause, they often don't realise they are doing more harm than good, i.e. blocking half of Australia's email.