Spam hunters given $11.7m fine!

September 15, 2006 on 5:16 pm | 13 Comments

Whilst im not a fan of email spam I am happy about this paticular bit of news!

My gripe with spamhunters, other than the fact that they’re generally a minor pain in the arse is that they often get their facts wrong and label people, companies and websites as spam when they’re not!

In this case Spamhaus (which names and shames email spammers) has been fined for stating the marketting company e360insight was an affiliate with a well known spammer. Not only do you have the libel implications here but they also put e360insight on a spam list which many large email providers use which resulted in people not receiving emails from e360insight and in effect caused a potential loss of earnings to e360insight.

It is about time something like this has happened! If spamhunters want to waste their time chasing people then they better make sure they get their facts right!

I actually commented on spamhunters often getting it wrong on the spamhuntress website. You can see my comments on her blog.

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You, sir, are an idiot. First of all, e360insight IS A SPAMMER. They were put on that list for a reason. That reason was, and remains, valid. Blacklists like the sbl-xbl from Spamhaus are an integral part of the fight against SPAM. There are rules to using and sending email these days. Rules that must be followed that will avoid you being labeled a spammer. Anyone with half a brain can find out what these rules are and abide by them. People like you obviously don’t care or don’t know what those rules are and think blacklists are bad.

This ruling means NOTHING. It was a default judgement. Something you didn’t even mention. Spamhaus didn’t show up therefore the judge was forced to rule in favor of the plaintiff. The problem with the ruling is that it is meaningless. Spamhaus is an organization based in the U.K. They have no obligation to recognize U.S. state law. The judgement cannot even serve as a precident because it was a default judgement. So, basically, e360insight spent a lot of money to humilate itself because everyone knows they are SPAMMERs as well as rallying the forces of the AntiSpam warriors to raise our collective middle fingers at e360insight and get even more people to use the Spamhaus sbl-xbl.

Comment by Smarter than you — 15th September, 2006 #
Get your OWN facts straight, Esrun. e360insight is in fact a spammer, regardless of what any clueless judge might say.

Comment by Paul Ramon — 16th September, 2006 #
The only way you could consider spam blocking as a pain in your arse is if you somehow earn an income thru or relating to spamming.

Also, When you use the word “spamhunters” in a negative manner, you paint with a broad brush. Indicating again where your alliance lies.

Let me show you an example of your free association logic:

Spywiper is anti-spyware – Spywiper is bogus
therefore all antispyware is bogus
therefore all spyware is good

Or….more absurd “Esrun logic”
I have long hair
A Yak has long hair
therefore I am a Yak

If my snail mailbox had to be as big as my email inbox, it would be larger than my garage and mail would come in a dump truck.

How can you possibly defend spam unless as I’ve pointed out…you are a spammer! -OR-

Spammers defend spam
Esrun defends spam
Therefore Esrun is a spammer

Mr. Notaperson

Comment by Reily Notaperson — 17th September, 2006 #
What a fool. It’s hardly worth mentioning, but this was a default judgement because spamhaus were in England laughing at the fact that someone thought a judgement in the US could affect them in the UK.

On top of that the company in question ARE KNOWN SPAMMERS. But, of course, you know that – being of the same brotherhood.

Comment by Alan — 18th September, 2006 #
Guys, he IS a spammer, just not a mail spammer. He won a competition by comment spamming guestbooks and blogs. Yeah, Esrun, I’ve known about your exploits for some time. I just didn’t feel like giving you more exposure.

Comment by Spamhuntress — 18th September, 2006 #
Spamhuntress, thanks for your comments… I guess. I have never hidden what I am or what I do, just looking around this site will let you know that. Right now I’m working on a range of tutorial videos starting out with some scraper tutorials and then hopefully moving onto spam. Anything I do is well within the law. If people offer me a chance to comment on their blog or guestbook then yes, I’ll take that opportunity.

Comment by admin — 18th September, 2006 #
Stephen Hill,
just because you don’t break any laws (yet) doesn’t mean search engines, hosting companies and affected webmasters will happily accept your spam. Search engines and hosting companies don’t need a law to terminate your accounts or ban your junk domains.

Regarding your article, if there were at least any attempts at proving your peculiar assumptions, I may take it more seriously. But instead you’re blindly parrotting the kook babbling from e360insight without checking their actual history. In my opinion you’re not a black hat but a laughing stock. See, all your hiding doesn’t help, people are still not taking you serious, just like back in your childhood when they laughed at you because of your stuttering.

Not a single thing you learned from your fate. You have no ethics and are full of hatred and think you have the god given right to promote yourself at other people’s expense. You are literally craving for being spanked and since your way of spamming isn’t particularily sophisticated (just like your writing is not) I’m very confident it will hopefully happening soon.

PS: You don’t like Shoemoney, do you Stephen Hill?

Comment by Vasiliy Pupklindtovich — 18th September, 2006 #
Vasily (Wes Gad), I remember you from the spamhuntress blog. Firstly I want to ask why you repeatedly call me Stephen Hill, do you think this name is not already in the public domain? Check my ‘about me’ page. Stephen or Esrun will be fine from here on.

Hosting companies need to operate within their T&C and any host that terminated my accounts without a valid legal reason would be on the receiving end of a law suit.

What do you mean “all your hiding doesn’t help”? I hide nothing! If anything I am one of the most open people in the BH seo industry! I am proud of what I do and I must be reasonably good since I have so much custom work and have so many visitors supporting me and my work.

What does my writing skills have to do with anything? I admit that my grammar and spelling may not be the best in the world but they have no effect on my ability to make money. I have created some very sophisticated spam scripts for your information, I just make a rule of not discussing private clients projects.

I don’t know where you got the Idea that I don’t like Shoemoney from. I consider Jeremy a good associate and support him in what he does.

Even if my spamming was to stop today I’d still continue to release free scripts, tutorials and continue providing comprehensive blackhat scripts.

Infact comments like yours do nothing but spur me on to help more and more people get into the spam game.

Comment by admin — 18th September, 2006 #
What you are doing is WRONG. Why do you not see that? I don’t care if you are “making money” or not. What you do goes against everything the Internet was made for and everyone hates it. You are a terrible person and I hope you see that.

Comment by I hate SPAMMERs — 18th September, 2006 #
[...] I presume its because of my comments on Spamhaus being fined $11.7m which was quoted by news.com. [...]

Pingback by Blackhat SEO - Esrun » Downtime (DDoS) — 21st September, 2006 #
Potential litigants had best read those T&Cs. Consider this:

http://www.ipowerweb.com/company/legal/legal_spamming.html

Skip to item (4)(a).

Then read this:

http://www.verio.com/about/legal/aup.cfm

Paragraph 3, sub-paragraph 1, “Spamming”

One way or another, you’ll be gone.

Comment by Martin Chuzzlewhit — 10th October, 2006 #
[...] Well I wrote about this a few weeks ago in my ‘spamhaus given $11.7m‘ fine blog post and I actually spoke to David Linhardt from e360insight not that long ago about the case. [...]

Pingback by Blackhat SEO - Esrun » e360insight VS. Spamhaus — 18th October, 2006 #
Once again, while looking for information, I find more rants about spam, from people that don’t seem to understand the terms they are using.

Everybody needs to stop and learn the difference between email spam and what people like to call “search engine spam”.

Email spam is a legally recognized term. “Search engine spam” is in no way recognized legally. Why? It probably stems from the fact that the search engines are nothing more then large “scraper” sites. Google makes money off of the “scraped” content of others. And ranting about robots.txt doesn’t change the fact that a webmaster is under NO obligation to include a robots.txt in his/her website.

And for the individual that thinks: “What you do goes against everything the Internet was made for and everyone hates it”

Just so we are all clear, the original purpose of the internet was to be able to transfer information in the event of a nuclear holocaust (look it up). It’s original purpose was not so you could do things like find your friends myspace account, or start a blog on why you like long-haired dogs, etc.

Most hard-core techies (long-time sysadmins, coders, etc) agree that the WWW part of the internet (yes there is a difference between the WWW and the internet, look it up) lost value as soon as it went beyond grey backgrounds and blue links with minimal pictures. If want to be able to do things like look for your favorite music album or if you are searching for things remotely related to commercial products, don’t get upset when you get fed advertisements.

And while were at it, lets all learn something about email and spam (I’ll keep it simple so that the trolls have something to pick apart)…

What is spam a.k.a email spam?
Spam is unsolicited email.

What does unsolicited email mean?
That means an email coming from an entity with which you have no prior relationship with.

So why am I saying all that?
Because most of the people that whine about email spam, dont realize that at some point they CONSCIENCELY signed-up for a newsletter or some form of email list, and by doing so they established a relationship with the owner of the newsletter or list, which therefore allows the owner of said newsletter or list to LEGALLY send that person email, and IT IS NOT LEGALLY CONSIDERED SPAM.

All the “zealots” can now feel free to safely spew nonsense comments related to my post, since I assure you I’ll never bother coming back to this thread or even this site for that matter.

Comment by someone with a clue — 23rd October, 2006 #

	SEOSPAMMER
	SEOSPAMMER
	seospammer @onlinehoster.com
	673418

Blackhat SEO – Esrun