The fact that I still get messages about this (got one today even) demonstrate that this is still an issue for a lot of respectable businesses.

As a point of clarification, the correspondence with SpamHaus did try to coerce us to a new ISP, which was something I thought was completely unacceptable and the primary driver for my analogy with the sex offender database.

The also refused to rectify the problem until I brought it to the attention of folks that raised the public profile of the listing. Most of the people who write to me frustrated about SpamHaus don’t have that option.

Last year, Spamhaus added spamwise.org to the SBL on the strength of a report that we were, “selling fake antispam software.” Which BTW is utter bunk. The site never even offered free software for download. It offers advice on spam prevention and online sitecheck tools.

At about the same time, flames against our site started appearing on blogs all over the place.

I get the distinct impression that while the original blacklisting might have been in-error, once that mistake had been made, the opportunity to crush a competitor who might eventually prove dangerous to their own business-model was simply too enticing to relinquish.

Perhaps the most surprising feature was the language used by Spamhaus operatives. You’d think you were dealing with a teenage script kiddie, from the abuse, swearing and bad grammar. Hardly the stuff you’d expect from a responsible corporation.

Spamhaus has two entire subnets a /20 and /21 blacklisted without notice to us for almost 7 days now.

Did we have a spammer on the network? Yes. Did we remove the spammer when we were notified? Yes. Within 12 hours. We removed the customer immediately and updated the ticket of Spamhaus. However, 6 days later we are still on the blacklist, and listed as a “fraud network”.

We have spammers sign-up all the time for our service, and sometimes sign up through our customers. Do we ask for this business? Absolutely not.

Now we are losing legitimate customers such as banks, small businesses, other hosting companies because

If a company is going to exert this much control over the internet, then they need to be regulated, by whatever jurisdiction they are in. There needs to be clear rules about removal procedures that are followed.

And their claim to Zero false positives? That is an absolute lie. We have had over 100 complaints of users having emails rejected to friends family and co-workers. How is that ZERO FALSE POSITIVES?

We are an ISP who had a spammer, Spamhaus listed a full /21 – we dealt with it right away but they just refuse to even respond. They destroy small businesses in the US and are supported by companies like Comcast, Yahoo, etc.

Everyone at spamhaus uses false identities (like spammers do) and publish no particular guidelines except basically if they don’t feel like dealing with you they won’t.

For those who support this terrorist-like organization, remember they are a foreign entity that is destroying good honest American businesses. They are profiting on this behavior and costing innocent people jobs for no true reason.

Nobody likes spammers, but spamhaus is just as bad if not worse.

If anyone here thinks they can provide a better service than Spamhaus, you should step up to the plate and provide it.

So…

Anyone? Hello? HELLO?? Anybody out there? Nobody? Aww.

We had a new client come to us a few days ago and we agreed to provide him with servers and IP’s. He presented valid justification for the IP he wanted and leased a good number of servers along with two colo servers we agreed to rack n stack for him.

Turned out he was a mailer, or one of his clients was a mailer. SpamHaus took out one of our /21′s when he was only leasted a /24 – we have emailed SpamHaus and yet to hear back from any one. The last time we had to deal with SpamHaus they ignored us and we didn’t hear ANYTHING from them EVER, we sent over 20 emails to them and the blocks are still there

Here is the most recent block – note to datacneters – dont host this guy DeltaColo / Jamie Whittingham

http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL86809

Your opinions on Spamhaus are generally off-base due to your own perspective to the situation. I took personal interest reading it along with the responses. I have worked with Spamhaus off and on since 2003, so I believe I have a somewhat decent idea how the ogranisation operates.

Basically, Spamhaus publishes info and services are used on a regular basis by mail administrators and ISPs’ abuse departments who contact Spamhaus via email to get listings removed.

Often when some company or person finds out that their IP(s) are listed on Spamhaus SBL blocklist for the first time, or just a few times, the person does not understand what is going on, so their best best is to work with their ISPs abuse department in getting their IP deslisted. Trying to do it yourself without full knowledge only works against you and may delay in getting it delist. Spamhaus
doesn’t want the affected parties to go to other ISPs, Spamhaus simply wants the spammer that caused the listing to be shutdown or terminated or unplugged. You kept saying that Spamhaus wanted you to go to another ISP, that is simply not the case.

Spamhaus is not perfect and they have some issues with keeping old information on their website. I also know that some large spamming sources do not get listed in a timely manner, but given how difficult it is to track spammers, I think Spamhaus overall does a better job than most.

With this in mind, blacklist services all vary tremendously. Some are plain awful to some being overall reasonable such as Spamhaus. There are plenty of DNSBLs (blacklist services) I do not recommend either because they block entire ISPs, make trollish comments in replies or simply do not reply because they are unresponsive and unprofessional: APEWS / SPEWS ASPEWS and its variants, SORBS, and Five Ten. Many blacklists come and go. I don’t think there is an overall fair approach to all this, but Spamhaus in generally stays professional in comparison to
some of these other services.

I would write more, but I think that this topic has gotten stale and I am not sure if it is being checked since I see a comment spammer entry above who is advertising his botnet.

My final assertion is I would think someone of your calibre of work (terrorism research) would have researched this topic in more detail before making your initial post. Good luck to you and I like your blog, you have some good information posted.