Spammers Legal Action Against Spamhaus Backfires

Email marketers (read: spammers!) e360 Insight’s recent legal action against Spamhaus has come back to bite them. In September, 2006, they obtained a judgement against the operators of the SBL forcing them to remove any and all IP blocks belonging to them from the blacklist The funny part is this-two of the blocks which were proven to be sources of spam, weren’t even linked to e360 until they were listed in the judgement. In essence, they stood up and proclaimed they were spammers. Here is an excerpt from Spamhaus’s recently released incident report:

        “Nothing in the IP address registration, domain registrations, nor even in the spam sample itself, even remotely showed any connection with e360 Insight or David Linhardt. At the time of creating the record it was technically impossible for Spamhaus to know that the IP range the spam was coming from and these domains were owned by David Linhardt.

Only when the Plaintiff’s counsel sent Spamhaus’ counsel a demand for SBL record SBL52363 to be removed, claiming it was in violation of Judge Kocoras’ order to never list David Linhardt’s domains or IPs, did Spamhaus then know that SBL52363 and therefore the 80 anonymous domains and IP range belonged to David Linhardt.

In other words, the spamming domains were anonymous and untraceable until e360 opened their big mouths and busted themselves. They also sued Comcast, saying they had the right to send mass emails to Comcast users, but last month, a judge ruled in Comcast’s favor. Here is an excerpt from e360′s response:

        ”Over the past few years, e360 has become aware of the intimate connection between improper blacklisters, fanatical anti-spammers and U.S.-based internet service providers (ISP’s). ISP’s, many of whom have previously employed or worked with e360 and its founder, provide blacklist organizations with financing and data and encourage nefarious behavior in the name of fighting spam. In our opinion, ISP’s who provide email services have strong incentives to block email, but little incentive to deliver it. These companies operate under a cloak of invincibility and without the knowledge and consent of the consumers for which the email messages are intended. In our experience, we believe this power is regularly abused to the detriment of legitimate marketers, the U.S. economy, and American consumers.

e360 continues to play the victim, claiming all email they send is legit and opt in, but the findings in their case against Spamhaus say otherwise. Then again, should we expect any less from a spammer?