Anti-Spam Site Gets Sued, Loses... What's It Mean for You?

I try to keep discussion of lawsuits to a minimum on this blog, but once in a while an interesting suit rears its head which possibly has large and lasting effects on you, even though you may not realize it yet.

The issue today is the recent judgment against Spamhaus, a volunteer spammer blacklisting web service that was ordered to pay $11.7 million in damages to someone it accused of being a spammer, and the court is now considering ordering the suspension of Spamhaus' domain name altogether, which could effectively put it out of business. Spamhaus' lists are subscribed to by many ISPs as their sole method of spam control, so such a move could open the spam floodgates for many average users (and I'd presume a good portion of you readers) until alternative protection can be arranged.

I can't comment on the merits of the case and ruling against Spamhaus (the complexities include whether the U.S. courts can order the suspension of a UK website's domain name, and whether the European DNS managers will agree to enforce it), but such a case was really only a matter of time. In fact, Spamhaus readily admits it "receives a constant flow of threats of legal action," which by and large it ignores as originating outside the company's jurisdiction. Well, most courts don't take kindly to being ignored, and so, when three months ago David Linhardt's temporary restraining order didn't have any effect, the U.S. courts slapped Spamhaus with something meatier. Spamhaus could now be facing an unenviable fight for survival.

As much as I appreciate anti-spam services (and use several layers of them myself), it's worth noting that many many legitimate companies, ISPs, and individuals have found themselves wrongfully blacklisted by these systems. Getting off of a spam blacklist can be time-consuming and difficult, and many anti-spam services take a "guilty until proven innocent" stance against those sending email. I don't know about you, but having a single non-spam message flagged as spam (a false positive) is a far bigger problem for me than receiving 50 actual spam messages that get through my filters.

Bigger issues are at stake here, including the way courts can influence the management of domains and the way genuine spammers might be able to use that power to strongarm such anti-spam services into taking them off the blacklist. For better or worse, this will all be sorted out over the next few months (or years, even).

What should you do in the meantime? Don't rely on your ISP to stop spam for you. It's a good first step but, as you can see, hardly foolproof. Take spam control into your own hands by installing a filter you manage yourself. I've recommended it before and will do so again: If you use Outlook, SpamBayes is the best anti-spam solution I've found, and it's free. (Sorry webmail users, you'll need to use your provider's anti-spam services.)

More details as this issue develops.