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More Anti-Spamhaus Fun


Yesterday, I pointed you at an anonymous blog, written by some angry random dude who happens to be really upset about Spamhaus. Anonymous ranty blogs are no fun; it's much more fun to mock the person behind them when you have a face go to along with the angry confusion.

Which leads me to the subject of today's post: Andrea Gozzi, author of SpamhausSucks.com. Here's why he's mad. Just over a year ago, there was this horrible "fight abuse with abuse" site called Spamza. Submit somebody's email address to it, and boom, you get signed up for a bunch of unwanted email. Hundreds of unwanted emails. Maybe thousands. Yuck.

A whole bunch of smart people instantly noticed Spamza, and realizing that fighting abuse with abuse is the most stupid idea ever, they worked in various capacities to limit, block, or remove the site. Blocking the cable modem IP that was the source of the signups. Contacting the guy's ISP, pointing out that he's probably breaking their terms of service, etc. Very quickly, Spamza went away.

Mr. Cozzi watched all of that unfold, and perhaps thought to himself, hey, I've got a great idea, why don't *I* host Spamza! That way this kid can keep on harassing people! It's a free speech issue!

Which it's not, obviously. Speech is fine, but purposely forging signups to inflict large numbers of unwanted emails on unsuspecting internet users isn't free speech. I'd actually call it abuse and spam facilitation. And it turns out that Spamhaus agreed with my take on that, quickly blacklisting anything related to or associated with Spamza, and this included Andrea and Andrea's ISP.

Eventually, all was resolved. His ISP's mail servers were removed from the blacklist, Spamza finally went away, and everybody was happy. Almost.

Andrea asked who at Spamhaus was he talking to, annoyed at the pseudonymous responses froming from the SBL-Removals address. Their reply: "Consider us representatives of the thousands of anonymous victims of Spamza, both receivers and senders."

He laments that this indicates Spamhaus has a "higher authority" fantasy. Not exactly true; Spamhaus very much was legitimately working on behalf of many victims of Spamza's abuse. Myself included.

And even if it was true, Andrea's sending a bit of a mixed message. He thinks Spamhaus "sucks" and has apparent delusions of grandeur, yet he points out that he still happily uses his lists to block incoming spam. Buh?

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