BlogDiscouraging the usage of spamhaus.org

The SpamHaus Project, an anti-spam company, has recently blacklisted our IP pools and listed us as cybercriminals. This blacklisting was precipitated by a website started by one of our customers to mock and discuss the doubtful activities of the "Nonprofit Organization" at http://stophaus.com.

The server which is used to host the website has no SMTP software thus could not be used to issue unsolicited e-mails.

SpamHaus has requested us to remove the "spam/crime" in order to be unlisted, as there is no evidence or reason to discontinue service to our customer we may reserve the right to prosecute SpamHaus.

http://www.spamhaus.org website neither lists any phone number nor the address which was used to register the trademark; Obviously they have done this in order to minimize risks of legal prosecutions.

We believe that it is important for people to learn how to prevent SPAM on their own rather than using services such as SpamHaus. SpamHaus plays on people's ignorance to build its notoriety, popular services such as hotmail.com, aol.com, yahoo.com started to use SpamHaus services to detect junk e-mails. Although it sounds good, SpamHaus does not prevent SPAM, and is not doing anything to make the Internet better:

Spam exists because it works. The issue is that people don't know how to recognize it. Why don't they know about it? The main reason is that those people have been continuously using solutions which are doing the tasks for them, solutions which have never taught them anything but rather have made them even more vulnerable targets.

SpamHaus has existed since 1998 and so far has never shown any statistical decrease in spam e-mails, statistics show that SPAM practices have increased in a disproportion to the growing number of connected machines to the Internet. The SpamHaus process is futile, if one were to want to SPAM hotmail.com, aol.com, or yahoo.com (popular services using spamhaus) all that one would need to do is find a host which is not listed by spamhaus and use it to spread your malicious mails. This is exactly what happens, leaving more than enough time before spamhaus spots it... We have opened test accounts on hotmail.com (which uses spamhaus) we clearly receive more spam than on an account registered at an other such as gmail.com (google has its own filters).

You should never use solutions, especially when they are commercial, that are used as  additional layers to either supervise or manage your infrastructures. Those solutions, rather than helping simply spread ignorance. Always read the documentation of tools you use, you won't waste your time and if you really do not want to, you'd be better off to pay an expert to do it rather than choosing an ineffective solution like spamhaus.

As to SpamHaus, it is clear than the number of clients for hotmail.com, aol.com, and yahoo.com have decreased (mostly because of gmail.com). Since those three were probably the biggest spamhaus customers, it is from a certain despiration for a shrinking market share that they try to compensate by harassing small entities such as ours. We invite you to share our message and we hope that large electronic mail services will use fewer services like spamhaus.org.

Steve Linford (Linton) SpamHaus CEO Apple-minded fanboy
Steve Linford (Linton) SpamHaus CEO Apple-minded fanboy
21 March, 2013