e360 vs Spamhaus Update


Here’s an update on the Amicus Brief filed in support of Spamhaus.

Matt Blumberg of ReturnPath published an article on March 13th about why his company decided to sign the amicus brief. Derek Harding, CTO of Innovyx, has done the same, writing an article published in ClickZ on March 22nd answering the question, “What’s in it for us?”

In related news, E360 is suing some anti-spammers who participate in the newsgroup NANAE, aka news.admin.net-abuse.email. Mickey Chandler pointed out with his launch of SpamSuite.com.

Ken Magill reported on it for Direct Mag here. It’s a bit light on what NANAE actually is or how it works, but accurate overall.

Compare that to Dianna Dilworth writing for DMNews. I found her article to be very embarrassingly incorrect in a couple of places. NANAE is referred to as a “web forum” and that it “did not immediately return e-mails for comment.” Um, it’s not a person. It’s not even an official association of any sort, so there is no Mr. NANAE to write to when looking for An Official Statement. She also implies that www.nanae.org is some sort of official website for the usenet group, which it is not.

Usenet is a collection of ISP and private servers that choose to participate in a message-based internet discussion system that predates the world wide web by at least twelve years, and probably longer. So it’s not a “web” anything, though nowadays, many people read usenet newsgroups via Google Groups, which incorporates access to these newsgroups. Wikipedia has an excellent overview of usenet if you’d like to learn more.

News.admin.net-abuse.email (NANAE) is just one of the many thousands of discussion forums carried via usenet. Like many groups, it’s unmoderated, meaning that there is nobody in charge. It’s a bit like the Wild West, and it can be painful to navigate through and participate in without some pretty heavy filtering. Name calling is rampant. A lot of talented anti-spam folks participate in NANAE to varying degrees, myself included, but a lot of other participants are not quite so knowledgeable, or care to act in a professional manner.

As I mentioned before, it looks like both the lead guys behind E360 (Dave Linhardt) and Spamhaus (Steve Linford) have been caught taking pot shots at each other on NANAE.
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