E360 apparently sells affiliate status to other spammers to force removal under injunction
(See the tag "E360" for more background on this story. In short, E360 Insight has obtained a court order forbidding anti-spam organization Spamhaus from listing E360 or any of its properties as a spammer.)In April, I commented on E360's request that Spamhaus be forced to remove listings based entirely on E360's word that they owned the listed domain. Spamhaus noted that this would in effect allow E360 to sell affiliations to any spammer that wanted to be removed.
A week ago, I observed that E360 seemed to be advertising just such a service.
Well, as of today, Spamhaus has filed notice to the judge that E360 has done exactly that.
On June 15, 2007, counsel for e360 wrote counsel for Spamhaus and demanded that Spamhaus remove from its list of known spammers certain IP addresses owned by a company named Virtumundo. ... e360’s June 15 letter asserts that Virtumundo is a customer of and doing business with e360, and that e360 has contracted with Virtumundo for network management and eMessaging services...The service agreement between E360 and Virtumundo makes it clear that neither company has any ownership interest in the other, and that E360 is merely acting as a service provider. One cannot help but suspect that the "service" E360 is actually offering is the removal of Spamhaus record SBL41635.
Full text of Spamhaus' notice to the court, and their exhibits, including a copy of the agreement between E360 and Virtumundo can be found at Spamsuite.
Update: Direct magazine (email marketers' trade magazine) has an article about this, entitled "Linhardt Turns Spamhaus Court Order into New Service".
Labels: E360, legal, spamhaus, virtumundo
6:43 PM |
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5 Comments:
Do a searech for the term Virtumundo and Spamhaus is not the first thing to come up.
It is pathetically obvious that Virtumundo has been operating maliciously, their name now well-associated with malware and unwanted adware, and that pretty much every antivirus / antimalware vendor on the planet is well aware of what their software has been doing for years now.
Why target spamhaus? Clean up your act, Virtumundo. THEN talk about clearing your domain from one piddly little blacklist.
Honestly: when are these companies going to learn their lessons?
SiL
lol, have you seen the spam that only contains information about spamhaus? They must be trying to posion filter with information about Spamhaus... nasty little buggers are they not?
I hadn't thought of that. Current thinking among spam-fighters is that it's a joe-job, but yes, maybe they're trying to somehow poison filters.
joe-job, theres a new one for my vocabulary.
Hmm, perhaps I should have created a link to the vocabulary: Joe Job
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