Oral arguments in Spamhaus’ appeal were held last week. Mickey blogged about it on Thursday. I heard from him and a bunch of the Spamhaus folks about it at MAAWG, but was busy enough that I didn’t get a chance to listen to it. Mickey is not exaggerating on how badly the judges, particularly Judge Posner, beat up on e360’s lawyer. More quotes are available at Appeals judges berate spammer for “ridiculous,” “incompetent” litigation.
ReturnPath sold its email change of address division to Fresh Address and spun off its email marketing division. Full announcement at the RP Blog and a copy of the press release at EmailKarma.
e360 petitioned the court earlier this week to compel Spamhaus to expand on their answers to e360’s interrogatories. Today the court denied the motion. Text of the motion at Mickey’s place.
There has been a noticeable increase in registrar phishing over the last week. This may be related to ICANN de-accrediting ESTHosts, a registrar well known in the anti-spam community for registering domains used in phising and spam. UPDATE from ICANN.
Everyone I talk to when dealing with issues inevitably has to tell me they are legitimate email marketers. They’re not spammers, they’re just business people. I often find it difficult to fathom why they need to tell me this. It’s not like email marketers are criminals or anything.
Two recent stories reminded me how evil some folks are. While I’ve not had any direct contact (that I know of) with any of the players on this end of things I have zero doubt that if they called me they would tell me that they were legitimate email marketers.
In one case, a members of a spam gang kidnapped the teenage daughter of someone investigating their activities. The gang held her for more than 5 years in horrific conditions. Yesterday Joseph Menn, author of “Fatal System Error” posted on Boing Boing that his friend got his daughter back. It is a heartbreaking story and incredibly sobering.
In another case, the Russian police arrested a man who ran spammit.com, a clearinghouse for viagra sellers to find spammers to send their mail. Reports say that mail volumes dropped by a fifth after the site was taken offline.
There is real evil in the email marketing industry. Sure, they’re spammers and we can all stand up and say they’re not legitimate. But, this is what the ISPs and Spamhaus and law enforcement are dealing with on a regular basis.
Today’s been chock full of phone calls and dealing with clients, but I did happen to notice a bunch of people having small herds of cows because Spamhaus listed www.gmail.com on the SBL.
“SPAMHAUS BLOCKS GOOGLE!!!” the headlines scream.
My own opinion is that Google doesn’t do enough to police their network and their users, and that a SBL listing isn’t exactly a false positive or Spamhaus overreaching. In this case, though, the headlines and the original article didn’t actually get the story right.
Spamhaus blocked a range of IP addresses that are owned by Google that included the IP for www.gmail.com. This range of IP addresses did not include the gmail outgoing mailservers.
Spamhaus says