Sleepycatz

Spam Me!

About a month ago an Illinois court found the Spamhaus Project– one of the premier open sources of spam blacklists - libel for $11M to a spammer — bargandepot.net, e360 Insight, and it’s clients. Spamhaus is a UK organization; therefore, they believed a state ruling in Illinois had no effect. On the 6th, however, the Illinois court issued a proposed order which would require ICANN - the governing body of Internet names and numbers - to revoke the spamhaus.org domain. This would set several very ugly legal precedents, and — if the overall ruling holds — neuter almost all spam filtering.

Mathew Prince - an Illinois attorney - has summed up that case at SecuriTeam blog.

Spamhaus is a volunteer organization which maintains a series of blacklists containing the addresses of mailservers and proxies which have some history of sending spam. These lists are made available for postmasters with the stipulation that they are not guaranteed to be 100% accurate. Postmasters utilize them — even with the knowledge that they may block legitimate mail — because of the higher level of accuracy available in the large datasets lists like this utilize. Spamhaus, and lists like it, have been the target of legal actions by spammers for years. Many list operators have given up; however, thankfully, not all have.

E-mail, and the Internet for that matter, works simply because tens of thousands of network operators agree to adhere to certain standards. Those of us who have been around long enough remember when there were three competing e-mail systems across the networks that made up the Internet understand this better then others. Whether or not a particular administrator is willing to accept mail from one network or another is entirely up to him or her — of course, the administrator must answer to their users. Postmasters routinely block mail with specific subjects or source addresses — I know one postmaster whose servers reject all e-mail originating in China. They must be allowed this freedom in order to keep their networks running and their users happy. To suggest that Spamhaus is responsible for decisions made by particular administrators — across thousands of networks — is either woefully ignorant, or disingenuous. e360 Insight is simply trying to remove tools from administrator’s hands, so they may continue to their questionable activities.

In my capacity, I am responsible for overseeing twenty, or so, mailservers. We make some use of various Realtime Blackhole Lists available — including Spamhaus. These lists help to identify and reduce the amount of spam recieved by our customers. If ICANN revokes Spamhaus’ domain - and perhaps their addresses - other spammers will use this tactic to shut down all centralized lists. Ultimately, this means the overall increasing level of spam on the Internet will climb even higher; making the Internet less productive and, therefore, less useful.

The complexity of the ramifications here cannot be understated - the issues which ICANN’s decision will raise could effect the very building blocks of the Internet — for instance, it has been suggested that alternate ROOT servers could supply dns resolution for an alternate spamhaus domain if ICANN revokes their .org identity. If this becomes reality, it will become a trend and make already harried Internet operations even more chaotic. Ultimately, there is some hope that this will be worked out. However, these types of issues will continue to arise until 1) the courts recognize that there is no single regulated system on the Internet, and 2) Spammers loose any incentive to continue their odorous activities.

This entry was posted by steve on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 12:53 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.