Email Servers Will Choke, Says Spamhaus

Rub3X writes, "The legal battle between antispam organization Spamhaus and e360 Insight is heating up. Spamhaus has a user base of around 650 million, and its lists block some fifty billion spam emails per day, according to the project's CEO Steve Linford. Spamhaus CIO Richard Cox says the immediate issue is that if the domain is suspended, the torrent of bulk mail hitting the world's mail servers would cause many of them to fail. More than 90% of of all email is now spam, Cox says, and he doubts that servers worldwide would be able to handle a ten-fold increase in traffic." Others estimate Spamhaus's blocking efficacy as closer to 75%; by this metric spam would increase four-fold, not ten-fold, if Spamhaus went unavailable. The article paraphrases CIO Cox as saying that the service will continue "even if there is a short-term degradation."

Comments

Re:I say let the spam come

[misleb]

It would be interesting if all email server admins suddenly opened the flood gates for a day or two. Maybe then the general population will gain a better appreciate of the scale of the matter.

I think most internet users still remember what it was like before spam filtering became common. Wait a few more years. Then users will take the filtering for granted.

-matthew

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[rar]

Easy. We just need to set up a protocol where an ISP is charged $0.01 per email sent. That will kill the spammers without having any real effect on people sending email.

Actually, the problem is not this simple. Spammers today send their emails from millions of hacked computers worldwide. They will just continue to do so, and these charges will drop on the clueless users whose computers are used to send the emails.

As long as computer security is as bad as it is today, there just is no easy solution to spam. All hyper-clever ideas about encrypted network id:s, black and whitelists, hashcash, etc, are just temporary solutions --- they only serve to drive the spammer to more intensly use the fact that a hacked computer also gives access to an online identity.

Interesting legal argument.

[cperciva]

I'm starting to wonder about the sanity of Spamhaus' lawyers -- or if they really have lawyers at all. So far their arguments seem to have been

1. This case is at the wrong court, it should go to a federal court instead.
2. (to the federal court) We agreed that you had jurisdiction over this, but we're going to pretend that we didn't say that.
3. What? You've decided that we broke the law? Well, you shouldn't punish us because we're really nice people.

While I do not doubt Spamhaus' credentials as really nice people, this is hardly relevant to the case in question.

Re:Hysterical claptrap

[deepb]

Spamhaus has no idea how many spams it actually blocks.

It's an estimate based on their query volume. That's certainly not going to produce an exact number, but it's way beyond having "no idea".

Suggestion to spamhaus

[rar]

Why don't spamhaus just remove the e360 adresses from their regular spam lists and add them to a new list named "addresses no longer blacklisted becuase we were sued and ordered to remove them"?

That list would then serve as a perfect permanent black list for all sysadmins who happen to think that people who sue spam lists might not be the kind of people who send worthwhile emails.

I would actually recommend even higher priority to that list in the spamassassin config file than spamhaus' regular blacklists :)...

Re:I say let the spam come

[TapeCutter]

"I think Spamhaus is trolling after making an ass out of itself in court."

Ummmm, they didn't go to court and they have not accepted anything, Spamhaus are demonstrating their view that the court does not have jurisdiction, Spamhaus seem to have a clue what they are talking about but the judge isn't listening since they refused to recognise the court by showing up. And if push really did come to shove then Spamhaus would probably just "reboot the company" in a different country.

I've been in front of a few judges in my time and IMHO many of them are the most arrogant people you could possibly imagine. I know very little about the US court system but I am guessing a district judge is not very high up the judicial foodchain and would have a hard time shutting down the internet no matter how hard he bangs his gabble. Meanwhile the rest of the planet will treat an unenforcable court order from this judge about as seriously as they would a court order from the judge in this case.

Re:Use the UK server name!

[Digital Vomit]

...it's not subject to US law

It's sad how this statement is becoming more and more associated with freedom nowadays.

Re:I say let the spam come

[DoomfrogBW]

RTFA

I think you are terribly mistaken. Spamhaus screwed up. They could of ignored or sent an attorney as special counsel to the case without acknowledging the jurisdiction of the Illinois court. Because they asked it to be moved to Federal, they pretty much acknowledged that the judge now has jurisdiction over the case. Then, because they don't like the judgement, they go ahead and try and ignore it. Instead of not showing up, Spamhaus could of done a better job in front of jury. Because they didn't, the judge didn't have much choice as the plaintiffs win by default.

You do not win a fight in the U.S. court system .

[WhiteWolf666]

. . . by threatening judges with impending doom.

Really. It doesn't work, unless, of course, you are the President, warning judges about terrorists.

Still, I've argued this point before; there's at least a few points of dispute regarding jurisidiction, and spamhaus should have showed up in court.

It doesn't matter if they are ultimately right; what matters is that it is not 100% clear cut, and as such, a judge will give a plaintiff a great deal of leeway in a default situation.

Re:I say let the spam come

[CastrTroy]

But at least with Yahoo, it ends up in the spam box. Hotmail puts it in your inbox. Unless you turn on the option to only receive mail from your contacts (Whitelists are stupid) then just about everything ends up in your inbox with Hotmail. I have accounts for both, and as of now, I have 927 spam messages in my spam box from yahoo. With hotmail I have I have 2700 message in my inbox, 14 of which are from my contacts; I have 12 messages in my junk mail box. So, hotmail is terrible at blocking spam, while Yahoo, at least puts it in a separate box for you, so it doesn't clutter up your inbox.