I just about died laughing after I read the following thoroughly disrespectful and marginally safe-for-work blog on All Spammed UP, a site that comments on email and spam issues. Let nobody tell you that the people involved in the spam wars have no sense of humor. T’ain’t true.
The straight story: last week UK-based antispam organization Spamhaus blocklisted a large IP range belonging to a smallish Dutch ISP, A2B Internet. The reason given was that A2B Internet had ignored repeated SBL listings and complaints about a customer, Cyberbunker aka CB3ROB, and continued to route internet traffic for them. Spamhaus stated that Cyberbunker had a track record of hosting malware and the worst kinds of criminal spam and that SBL listings for this site had been increasing for most of 2011. A2B claimed it had blocked the IPs that were sending spam, but refused to quit routing traffic. Spamhaus said this was not good enough and constituted spam support, and as is their longstanding practice, listed a larger IP range in the SBL until A2B complied. (Spamhaus calls this an escalation listing.) A2B complied, and the escalation SBL was removed. All of this occurred within, I am told, a 48 hour period.
You’d think that this would be the end of the matter. It wasn’t. A2B’s managing director, a party by the name of Erik Bais, complained bitterly on Twitter, and then (perhaps because he failed to get a response from Spamhaus) filed a police report with the Dutch authorities accusing Spamhaus of “extortion”, “DDoS” (distributed denial-of-service-attack), etc. I really can’t improve on All Spammed Up’s take on the whole situation after that. Enjoy!