Australian businesses will be hit by Spamhaus removal

17.10.2006
Australian businesses can expect a massive increase in spam if a US court carries out its threat to shut down the Spamhaus Project which is a nonprofit, volunteer-run organization that compiles up-to-date blacklists of known spammers.

Internet service providers (ISPs) across the globe rely on the Spamhaus Project, which claims it blocks up to 50 billion spam e-mails per day.

Judge Charles Kocoras of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois threatened to shut down Spamhaus earlier this month for ignoring a US$11.7 million judgement against it for listing an e-mail company called E360Insight in its database of known spammers.

Spamhaus, based in London, has said that it ignored the judgement because it cannot be enforced in the UK.

Peter Stewart, Australia/New Zealand managing director of security e-mail provider TotalBlock, fears the court order will set a precedent for the closure of other blacklist organizations and without their protection global business communications could be severely disrupted.

"Blacklisting was never an efficient way of curbing spam, since far too many innocent e-mail users are wrongly listed and find it very difficult indeed to clear their names from blacklists," he said.