Group Warns Of More Junk E-mail

CHICAGO: The anti-spam group Spamhaus Project has warned that more junk e-mail could be on the way to our mailbox. They are about to lose lose their domain name to a company. The company has accused of sending spam mails.
U.K.-based Spamhaus Project said that Monday they expect a federal judge in Chicago to sign an order that would suspend the domain spamhaus.org because the group has refused to recognize the U.S. court and comply with a .7 million judgment.

According to Spamhaus, more than 650 million Internet users - including those at the White House, the US Army and the European Parliament benefit from Spamhaus' "blacklist" of spammers that helps identify which messages to block, send to a "junk" folder or accept. Losing the domain name would make it more difficult for service providers and others to obtain the lists.

Spamhaus warned the order could unleash up to 50 billion junk e-mails a day on computer users worldwide, though legal and technology experts were skeptical the effect would lead to millions of clogged inboxes.

According to Steve Linford, if the domain got suspended, it would be an enormous hit for the net. An enormous amount of damage would be created on the internet. However, experts sayeven if the order filed Friday is executed, it's unlikely people would suddenly see much more junk mail.

The Spamhaus' blacklist is available online, and a suspension at most would provide a hiccup Web-savvy systems administrators could easily work around.

Domain names are merely shortcuts to access a site's true, numeric Internet address. Spamhaus could simply distribute that address instead of the domain name.

Spamhaus CEO Linford said the group has backup plans in place to keep spam filters functioning, but alerting its customers to change the address their system uses to reference the blacklist would be daunting.

"The effect it will have on e-mail queues around the world will be a large amount of networks' mail servers will simply fall over, they'll simply not be able to handle it," he said.

Sources