more on more on ICANN ordered by Illinois court to suspend spamhaus.org

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dave Crocker <[email protected]>
Date: October 11, 2006 11:56:43 AM EDT
To: David Farber <[email protected]>, [email protected]
Cc: "Prof. Jonathan I. Ezor" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on ICANN ordered by Illinois court to suspend  
spamhaus.org


David Farber wrote:
> From: "Prof. Jonathan I. Ezor" <[email protected]>
> I'm writing an article on this very subject which I will presenting  
> in Denmark in December (http://www.iblt.eu), so I've been following  
> this case with some interest.   I'm not surprised by the ruling,  
> nor by Spamhaus' recalcitrance--I have seen first hand how Spamhaus  
> will threaten to block list an entire hosting company in order to  
> get the host to shut down a Web site Spamhaus has decided is a  
> spammer, and also received caustic e-mail from Spamhaus when I  
> wrote on behalf of a wrongly blocklisted client.
> Improper inclusion in filters and block lists is becoming a huge  
> problem for legitimate communicators...


Dave,

What is most unfortunate about Prof. Ezor's note is that he correctly
identifies a significant concern but incorrectly asserts that Spamhaus
is guilty of it.

Those of us signing this response are active in anti-spam efforts. None
of us has direct or indirect involvement with any aspect of Spamhaus
operation, although some of us use one or more of the Spamhaus published
lists and are quite familiar with its operation. We feel that Prof.
Ezor's note warrants a community response, rather than merely getting
one from Spamhaus.

The world of spam and anti-spam engenders confusion and emotion, exactly
as one might expect from something involving open communication and
abuses of it.  That is why it is so important to distinguish between
participants who operate responsibly and those who do not.

It is certainly true that some anti-spam lists are operated in a
cavalier manner, even serving as outlets for personal vendettas.
Spamhaus is not one of these.  Spamhaus has a well-earned reputation in
the industry for acting responsibly, effectively and fairly.

Its criteria for being listed are clear and reasonable. Its mechanisms
for remedying being listed also are reasonable.  (See
<http://www.spamhaus.org/>.)  Not perfect, but reasonable. Indeed there
is a very strong consensus among the anti-spam community that Spamhaus
provides an essential infrastructure capability, needed for sustaining a
viable Internet mail service.

It is estimated that use of Spamhaus lists provides an extremely
efficient and inexpensive pre-filter of incoming mail, that detects
perhaps 75% of received spam. The remainder must be subjected to
computationally-costly and error-prone heuristic analysis. Remove the
benefits of having Spamhaus lists, and hosts receiving mail will
quadruple their processing overhead, along with significantly increasing
the number of false positives -- legitimatemail that is incorrectly
refused delivery.

It is worth considering Prof. Ezor's complaint in light of this
background. He characterizes Spamhaus as acting with threats and caustic
language, and of wholesale blockage of neighboring IP addresses that
have committed no offense.

We did some research on Prof. Ezor's case.  Spamhaus blocked exactly one
host IP Address.  Not a set, as he claims.  The host in question had
been the source of spam for some weeks, prior to being added to a
Spamhaus list.

Here is the entire text of the response that Spamhaus sent, after
receiving Prof. Ezor's claim that his client was improperly listed:

> ------------------------------------------------------------
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Urgent Letter Regarding Improper SBL Listing
> Date: 2 June 2004 09:37:27 GMT+02:00
> To: [email protected]
> Hello,
> When your client ceases employing spamming as a marketing method, your
> client will be removed from our database, until then your client will
> remain listed, it really is that simple. Legal threats serve only to
> inform us that rather than stop the spamming, the entity hopes to
> attempt to scare us into allowing him to continue with the spamming.
> National Collector's Mint engaged the services of not just one, but
> two extremely well known professional spammers listed in our Register
> of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database: Magnum Enterprises and John
> Grandinetti ("britmilla.com") to market their products. Spamhaus lists
> not only sources of spam, but also resources of those who directly
> profit by it.
> If National Collector's Mint doesn't like the reputation it is making
> for itself of being a purveyor of spam, and the consequences of
> spamming (being listed in the SBL), may I suggest you direct your
> legal effort at those responsible for your clients situation: the
> professional spammers your client is hiring and whomever in your
> client's organization hired them to spam for your client.
> Regards,
>   Steve Linford
>   The Spamhaus Project
>   http://www.spamhaus.org
> ------------------------------------------------------------


Even from the perspective of someone attempting to improve their
negotiating leverage, we do not see any reasonable way to characterize
Spamhaus' note as containing threats or caustic language.

What we do see is that Prof. Ezor's note makes it that much more
difficult to conduct reasoned public discussion of this very difficult
topic.

At the least, we hope that his upcoming presentation in Denmark is
written with more care, accuracy and balance than his note to the IP  
list.


Sincerely,

    Dave Crocker
         Principal
         Brandenburg InternetWorking
         bbiw.net

    Neil Schwartzman
         Chair
         on behalf of the Board of Directors
         CAUCE Canada: The Canadian Coalition Against
            Unsolicited Commercial Email
         http://cauce.ca/node/1

    James Lick
         Chair, on behalf of APCAUCE
         APCAUCE
         wiki.apcauce.org

    Scott Hazen Mueller
         Chairman and Founder, on behalf of the Board
         CAUCE (US)
         www.cauce.org

         Director and Founder
         International Coalition Against Unsolicited
            Commercial E-mail (iCAUCE)
         www.international.cauce.org

    Rick Wesson
         CEO
         Support Intelligence, LLC
         support-intelligence.com

         CEO
         Alice's Registry, Inc.
         ar.com

    Justin Mason
         PMC Member
         Apache SpamAssassin project
         spamassassin.apache.org

    Justin Greene
         President/CEO
         The Spamex Disposable Email Address Service
         www.spamex.com

    Larry E. Smith
         Owner/Partner
         Electronic Communication Systems
         www.ecsis.net

    J. William Campbell, Jr.
         Manager
         Celestial Software, LLC
         www.celestial.com

    Huey Callison
         Software designer and anti-spam activist
         [email protected]

    Bob O'Brien
         Software Craftsman
         whitelist.com

    Matt Sergeant
         Co-Author
         Draft DNSBL Best Practices (IETF ASRG)

         Member of the Board
         CAUCE Canada

    Chris Lewis
         Anti-spam infrastructure architect
         Nortel

         Senior Technical Advisor
         MAAWG

    Michael "der Mouse" Parker
	Vice-Chair and Secretary to the Board
	The Canadian Coalition Against
            Unsolicited Commercial Email
	http://www.cauce.ca/

    Peter Seebach
	President
	Plethora Internet
	http://www.plethora.net/

    Mickey Chandler
	President/CEO
	Whizardries, Inc.
	www.whizardries.com

    Paul Myers
	Publisher
	TalkBiz News
         www.talkbiznews.com

    John Glube
	Owner
	Glube's - Business Services
	www.trusted-email-sender.com

    Victor Duchovni
         Postfix developer
         http://www.postfix.org

    Suresh Ramasubramanian
         Coordinator
         APCAUCE
         wiki.apcauce.org

         Manager, Antispam Operations,
         Outblaze Ltd
         http://www.hserus.net

    Gadi Evron
         Security Evangelist
         Beyond Security

    Daniel Senie
         President/Founder
         Amaranth Networks Inc.
         amaranth.net

    Michael A. Atkinson
         Email Security Consultant
         [email protected]

    John Levine
         Member (North America)
         ICANN At Large Advisory Committee

    Edward Falk
         The Spam Diaries
         thespamdiaries.blogspot.com

    Don M. Blumenthal
         Former Internet Lab Director
         US Federal Trade Commission

    Gerard Alan Latham
         [email protected]

    Steven Champeon
         CTO
         hesketh.com/inc.

         Founder
         enemieslist.com

    Clifton Royston
         Antispam software developer
         President
         I and I Computing
         www.iandicomputing.com

    John Fitch
         Professor of Software Engineering
         University of Bath, UK
         people.bath.ac.uk/masjpf

         Director
         Codemist Ltd
         www.codemist.co.uk

    Peter Salanki
         Network Architect
         Bahnhof AB
         www.bahnhof.net

    Jonas Birgersson
         CEO Labs2 Group
         www.labs2.com

    Amar Andersson
         Senior Network Engineer
         TeliaSonera AB
         www.teliasonera.com

    Joe Greco
	sol.net Network Services
	http://www.sol.net

    Kelsey Cummings
         System Architect
         Sonic.net, Inc.
         corp.sonic.net

    Mark Mallett
         President
         MV Communications, Inc.
         www.mv.com

    Russell Nelson
         President
         Crynwr Software
         [email protected]

    Gerard Alan Latham
         Moderator
         sci.archaeology.moderated

    Patrick W. Gilmore
         Network Architect
         [email protected]

    Sean Eric Fagan
         Former MAPS employee
         [email protected]

    Robert H. Braver
         Owner
         oklahoma-isp.net
         www.oklahoma-isp.net

    Rik van Riel
         Linux kernel developer
         http://surriel.com/

    Mike Paulsen
         Concerned end-user
         [email protected]

    Ray Everett-Church, Esq.
         Principal
         PrivacyClue LLC
         www.privacyclue.com

         Co-Author
         Fighting Spam for Dummies

    Nick Nicholas
         In the Nick of Time IT Consulting
         nicknicholas.net

    Tony Finch
         Email systems specialist
         University of Cambridge
         dotat.at

    David Wright
         ISP Development Services, UK
         www.dww.org.uk

    Richard Welty
        Owner,
        Averill Park Networking
        www.averillpark.net

        Webmaster
        Spamvertized
        www.spamvertized.org/

    Jake Richter
        Managing Director
        NetTech, N.V.
        nettech.an

    Matthew Vernhout
        Concerned end-user
        www.vernhout.net

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net