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On Futureproofing Spamhaus
BMcWilliams writes "Spamhaus director Steve Linford announced a new funding plan Tuesday. According to Linford's announcement, large ISPs and big corporate users of the Spamhaus zone transfer service (renamed the Spamhaus Data Feed Service) will be required to pay an annual subscription fee ranging between $190 and $14,500.(The free public-query mirrors will continue to exist.) The point of the new plan is to ensure that 'the millions of users who rely on our anti-spam systems can be assured we'll be here for as long as spammers plague the Internet'."
In the meantime, thanks largely to ineffective spam laws passed by governments, we're having to step up the fight against spam with more resources....
Not that the gov't can do much anyway, but, it could do more. I think the fees are reasonable and I hope they are accepted and paid graciously.
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Erick
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In theory you are correct. In practice all ISP's will not simultaneously commence paid spamhaus subscription and increase their fees. I would imagine that some ISP's may use this, either globally or as a premium value added service. Unless you are in a monopolistic market you will be free to choose a spamhaus-free (either lacking or only free zone transfers) ISP and it's assosciated lower costs.
:)
Even then a lot of businesses may actually save money through reducing bandwidth costs due to spam. I hope they don't force those savings onto you...
Good points. Using the Spamhaus XBL and SBL actually saves a decent-sized ISP more than its cost in a given year in bandwidth, storage and CPU cycles.
Additionally Spamhaus is letting operators of free DNSBL mirrors continue the Zone Transfer for free. Perhaps additional ISPs will be given the option of getting the Zone Transfer for free in exchange for setting up another public mirror.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Spamhaus recommends organizations that get 200,000+ emails a day sign up for the service. Conservatively, I think, we can estimate that would mean 100,000 users
Just for reference, PSU has roughly 130,000 users, and averages around 4,000,000 emails a day (actually that number is about a year old, I imagine it is considerably higher given the microsoft viruses and spam that are going around now)
Finkployd
You're confusing Spamhaus with SpamCop. Only the latter has an affiliation with IronPort.
Spamhaus is a voluteer non-profit organization and is not owned by IronPort. I think you've mixed Spamhaus with Spamcop, which is owned by IronPort.
You are confusing Spamhaus with SpamCop...
Spamhaus has no affiliation with IronPort!
Several people have posted that I've confused Spamhaus with SpamCop. Sorry. It was careless on my part. My appologies to Spamhaus.
ey, dude, steve won't exactly be "making money big time" on this, as you assert in your post. The whole point for this price structure is to ensure the continued longevity of an essentially free-for-most, not-for-profit service. get it? And yeah maybe that money will give them more resources to deal with fringe cases such as the one you're outlining. The fact is, at some point, an ISP gave that IP block to a spammer. And for some reason spamhaus doesn't seem to feel confident about de-listing that block, maybe there's a good reason for that, i'll give spamhaus the benefit of the doubt any day. Maybe that'll teach ISPs to more carefully scrutinize who they give blocks to, and be more mindful of what sort of traffic goes on there.
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SPF is not a Microsoft technology. Caller ID is the Microsoft solution (similar but different). SPF was designed by pobox.com. Microsoft and pobox.com recently agreed to make SPF and Caller ID compatible, but they are still different methods:
1. SPF is text based; Caller ID is XML based (even though no other email header or DNS record is).
2. SPF verifies the envelope sender; Caller ID verifies the From header of the email. While both will be the same in many cases, they do not have to be.
SPF isn't flawed, the application is flawed. Put in a trouble ticket to the company that makes BlackBoard group learning systems and tell them they need to add outbound SMTP gateway support. That's a seriously misbehaved application if it just assumes it can send mail directly out. We haven't allowed users to send mail directly out for 12 years.. everyone has to relay through a central mail gateway for logging purposes.
Spamhaus is selling access to two lists.
One of them, the SBL, is a list used to apply pressure to ISPs. It doesn't stop that much spam. It's a political tool, just the same as the MAPS RBL was.
The other, the XBL, is extremely effective at stopping spam. But Spamhaus doesn't run the XBL. They're just downloading the (freely available) CBL and BOPM lists, then selling access to them for thousands of dollars a year.