ROKSO lawsuit settled

Earlier this year Ken Magill reported that a judge in the UK was allowing a libel case against Spamhaus to go forward. I thought for sure I’d blogged about the case at the time, but apparently I didn’t.
The short version is that today Spamhaus announced the lawsuit was settled and the complainants paid for Spamhaus’ legal fees.
As with most legal cases the details are complex and convoluted.  Let me try to sum up.

  • 2 people set up a company.
  • This company sends lots of unsolicited emails.
  • This company is disconnected from multiple service providers.
  • Spamhaus lists the 2 people, and their company information, on ROKSO.
  • The two individuals object to the ROKSO listing.
  • The two individuals bring a suit against Spamhaus for libel under UK law.
  • Spamhaus filed for summary judgement and/or dismissal.

All of the above happened mostly without any of us noticing. In late January, the judge published a ruling allowing the case to go forward.
The case is now settled. According to Spamhaus’ website their legal fees are being paid by the claimant. 
People have been trying to sue Spamhaus for years and have failed every time.

Related Posts

ROKSO

ROKSO is the Register of Known Spamming Operations. It is a list of groups that have been disconnected from more than 3 different networks for spamming. ROKSO is a little bit different than most of the Spamhaus lists. The listings themselves talk more about the background of the listees and less about the specific emails that are the problem.
Many ISPs and ESPs use ROKSO during customer vetting processes.
Networks can be listed on ROKSO without any mail being sent from those networks. These listings are as much about just categorizing and recording associated networks as they are about blocking spam.
Spamhaus does not accept delisting requests for ROKSO records. In order to be delisted from ROKSO there must be a 6 month period with no spam traceable to the ROKSO entity. After that 6 months the listee can petition for a review of the record. If the spam has stopped their record is retired.
In my experience there is often a lot of research put into each ROKSO record and not all that information is made public.
The only time a record is changed is if Spamhaus is convinced they made a mistake. This does happen, but it’s not that common. Given the amount of research that goes into a ROKSO record, there is a fairly high burden of proof to demonstrate that the information is actually incorrect.
It is possible to get delisted off ROKSO. In all of the cases I know about, the listed entity either got out of email altogether or they radically changed their business model.

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Fake DNSBLs

Spamhaus recently announced a few years ago that they have discovered a company that is pirating various blocklists, relabeling them and selling access to them. Not only is the company distributing the zones, they’re also running a “pay to delist” scheme whereby senders are told if they pay money, they’ll be removed from the lists.
The fake company does remove the listing from the fake zones, but does nothing to remove the IP from the original sender. This company has been caught in the past and was blocked from downloading Spamhaus hosted zones in the past, but have apparently worked around the blocks and are continuing to pirate the zone data.
It’s not clear how many customers the blocklist has, although one ESP rep told me they were seeing bounces referencing nszones.com at some typo domains.
No legitimate DNSBL charges for delisting. While I, and other people, do consult for senders listed on the major blocklists, this is not a pay for removal. What I do is act as a mediator and translator, helping senders understand what they need to do to get delisted and communicating that back to the blocklist. I work with senders to identify good, clean addresses, bad address segments and then suggest appropriate ways to comply with the blocklist requirements.

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The true facts of spam traps and typo traps

I’m seeing an increase in the number of articles stating wildly wrong things about spam traps. Some have started claiming that typo traps are new. Or that typo traps are newly used by Spamhaus. These claims make for great copy, I guess. Wild claims about how the evil anti-commerce self-appointed internet police are actively trying to trap marketers get clicks. These claims also reinforce the martyr complex some senders have and gives them something to commiserate about over drinks at the next email conference.
I strongly recommend ignoring any article that claims Spamhaus started using typo traps in December 2012. In fact, you can immediately dismiss absolutely everything they have to say. They are wrong and have proven they can’t be bothered to do any fact checking.
I can’t figure out why so many people repeat the same false statements over and over and over again. They’re wrong, and no amount of explaining the truth seems to make any difference. I went looking for evidence.
First, I asked on Facebook. A bunch of my contacts on Facebook have have been running spam traps for a long time. Multiple people commented that they, personally, have been using typos to track spam since the late ’90s. These typos were on both the right hand side of the @ sign (the domain side) but also on the left hand side of the @ sign (the username).
Then, I looked through my archives of one of the anti-spam mailing lists and I see a Spamhaus volunteer mentioning that he had already been using typo traps in 2007.  I asked him about this and he pointed out these are some of his older traps and had been around for many years before that mention. 
Of course, we’ve written about typo domains used by an anti-spam group to catch spam.
The truth is, typo traps are not new and they’re not a new set of traps for Spamhaus. I’ve talked about traps over and over again. But I’m seeing more and more articles pop up that make verifiably wrong statements about spam traps. Here are a few facts about spam traps.
 

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