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Perspectives on Spamhaus's Dilemma

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the oh-dearie-me dept.

The Illinois court that told Spamhaus to stop blocking the spammer filing suit against them — an order which Spamhaus ignored — is now considering ordering ICANN to pull Spamhaus's domain records. While Gadi Evron, whose blog posting is linked above, urges everyone to beat the judge with a clue stick, a guest writer on his blog counsels much greater restraint. Anti-spam lawyer Matthew Prince explains how Spamhaus got into its current pickle — apparently by following conflicting legal advice at two points in the process — and what they might have to do to get out. One spamfighter of my acquaintance says that Spamhaus's SBL and XBL blocklists knock out 75% of the spam at his servers before it hits and requires more CPU-intensive filtering. If ICANN is ordered to unplug Spamhaus from the DNS, and does so, is the Net prepared to deal with a 4-fold increase in spam hitting MTAs overnight?

2 of 420 comments (clear)

  1. Ted Stevens says by emil10001 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    of course the tubes will get clogged with all the internets being allowed now that weren't before! And it will probably take at least a day to get the new internets that are let through. /sarcasm

  2. The problem with anti-spammers... by 91degrees · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Is they keep thinking they're legally untouchable.

    Any time they feel the need to defend their service, they use pedantic arguments based on redefining what they're doing, and actually tend tyo get away with it because most of the people they're blocking are clearly spammers and acting in a borderline legal way.

    Then they get surprised when the court doesn't go exactly the way they expect.

    This is what brought down MAPS. Spamhaus may fare a little better, but it looks like they were caught with their trousers down.