Spam Kings

Chapter 4. 

Spamhaus Takes on Sue You Net

Steve Linford, the operator of the Spamhaus Project, a blacklist of spamware vendors and the ISPs who host them, asked Shiksaa in October 2000 to join an elite team of spam fighters in a new project he was launching. Her mission would be to help compile detailed dossiers on the Internet’s biggest junk emailers. The research would be published at Spamhaus.org as part of a pioneering effort Linford had dubbed the Register of Known Spamming Operations, or Rokso. His plan was to turn Rokso into an Internet hall of shame that would put pressure on shadowy spam operations by exposing them to the light of day.

More importantly, Rokso would provide Internet service providers with a much-needed clearinghouse for screening new customers. The Rokso list would include searchable records on each of the spammers, including descriptions of their junk email operations and spam samples, as well as contact information including aliases, business addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. To be included on the Rokso list, a spammer had to have been thrown off at least three Internet service providers. To get off the list, a junk emailer simply needed to refrain from sending spam for at least six months.

Rokso wasn’t the first effort to focus public attention on the Internet’s egregious bulk emailers. In 1995, Alex Boldt, a mathematics graduate student at the University of California in Santa Barbara, launched the Blacklist of Internet Advertisers. Boldt compiled ...