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.

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Blacklisting spammers is irresponsible because (A) how do you know they’re spammers? and (B) even spammers need to work to make a living. Besides when I tried the SpamHaus blacklist on my PC it didn’t stop anything at all in over a week so it obviously doesn’t work.

Also, a blacklist as big as Spamhaus should not be in the hands of one group. It should be run by a professional group we all belong to such as the Direct Marketing Association. Or it should be run by the government that way we can trust it’s run responsibly.

Also, they provided no evidence that the spammer was using multiple IP addresses in that subnet. In discussions with the ISP, the “spamming” box was isolated to a single host and they did not try to obfuscate themselves as they considered themselves to be in a legitimate direct mailing business providing services for 1800flowers, etc. Obviously, they did something to get on the SpamHaus list, but nothing was done to justify the entire block in the Spamhaus list, especially when that Class C was servicing several different customers. We only have a legitimate use for a handful of IP addresses and I am not going to irresponsible utilize a whole Class C just to avoid problems like this.

As I’ve said in the past, SpamHaus needs to demonstrate responsible constraint in blocking entire subnets. They also need to be incredibly responsive when they catch innocent businesses in their net. The appropriate response would have been to whitelist our IP as soon as we reached out to them to enable our business to resume. An inappropriate and completely irresponsible response is to continue to block an innocent IP address as a means of coercion to get us to switch ISPs.

I stand by my assessment that they are irresponsible, arrogant and abuse the power they’ve been entrusted with.

Now if you actually read that blob, good for you. It’s the most efficient way to deal with the problem, Spamhaus has it’s hand’s tied. If they didn’t block the entire subnet, spam would run wild.

So spamhaus, you can keep punishing spammers, but punish them all! I dare you to block the whole yahoo mail system, let’s see you, big brother!