Linhardt Turns Spamhaus Court Order into New Service

In one of his most intriguing maneuvers yet, e-mail marketer Dave Linhardt has turned his court order against anti-spam blacklisting concern Spamhaus into a new business that conceivably only his company, e360 Insight, can offer.

The service, dubbed Permission Verification Services, or PVS, aims to force Spamhaus to lift blocklistings—a designation that causes many ISPs to refuse to accept e-mail from the listed party—on companies Linhardt deems to have been unfairly tagged by the anti-spam concern.

In order to be PVS certified, marketers must submit copies of their entire active e-mail databases and all records proving the addresses were gathered on a permission basis, according to Linhardt.

Currently, he said, anti-spammers operate in McCarthy-like fashion where an accusation alone can be devastating.

“All you have to do is say somebody is a spammer and they can go out of business without [the accuser] having to present any evidence at all,” he said. “That’s what Spamhaus does. They don’t show any evidence and they put companies out of business. … They don’t have a standard. They don’t have any transparency to their process.”

Linhardt likens e360’s new PVS service to the credit-card charge-dispute process.

“One of the key aspects [in credit card disputes] is everybody gets to see all the information, so if a consumer disputes something, the merchant can see what the consumer said,” said Linhardt. “The merchant then has an opportunity to refute it by presenting their evidence. It’s a good process that’s fair to all parties involved.”

However, Spamhaus founder and executive director Steve Linford said in an e-mail exchange with this newsletter that his organization never blocklists without indisputable evidence.

“We always present evidence to back up SBL listings and always have overwhelming evidence when we say someone is a spammer—just in case it’s needed one day in court,” wrote Linford. “In the case of e360, we have thousands of spam samples sent to Spamhaus’s Spamtraps and to industry partners’ Spamtraps.”

Also, Spamhaus isn’t taking e360’s new business lying down.

“We will not remove any SBL record [blocklisting] of e360 customers or partners,” said Linford in an e-mail. “Such customers or partners will need to follow the normal SBL removal procedure and need to halt all spamming first.”

Indeed, according to court records dated yesterday, an early customer of e360’s service is Virtumundo, and Spamhaus is refusing to lift a block on the online marketing services firm.

Spamhaus maintains lists of what it deems are sources of unsolicited commercial e-mail that an unknown number of e-mail administrators use to determine whether incoming e-mail is spam. Marketers listed by Spamhaus can find it extremely difficult to get their e-mail accepted.

Last September, e360 and Linhardt won an $11.7 default judgment against Spamhaus when representatives of the anti-spam group failed to show up in court to defend themselves against a lawsuit Linhardt filed.

As part of the decision, the judge issued a permanent injunction barring Spamhaus from “taking any action to cause e-mail sent by Plaintiffs or their affiliates, subsidiaries, or related companies owned or controlled by Plaintiffs to be blocked, delayed, alerted, or interrupted in any way” unless Spamhaus can prove e360 broke U.S. anti-spam law.

Conceivably, any company doing business with e360 would be affiliated with it, and therefore, covered under the marketer’s court order against Spamhaus.

In a letter dated June 15, e360’s lawyer, Bartly Loethen, advised that “effective immediately, Virtumundo is a customer of and doing business with e360.” It then demanded Spamhaus remove a blocklisting in accordance with the injunction.

Spamhaus has so far refused to lift the block, claiming Virtumundo does not fall under the language of the injunction.

However, Linhardt said in his telephone interview with Magilla Marketing: “The injunction applies to e360, it applies to any other company that I own or e360 owns, and it applies to our affiliates.”

Linhardt added that the injunction was written specifically to address one of Spamhaus’s tactics.

“What they do is if they can’t get you, they get everybody doing business with you,” he said.

Linhardt is also advertising the new service against the keyword Spamhaus on Google. Whenever someone types the word “Spamhaus” on the search engine, an ad for e360 is among the sponsored results.

“Problems with Spamhaus?” it says. “Read how e360 helps verify permission & remove SBL listings.”

Clicking on the link takes the respondent to a press release announcing the new permission verification service with a link at the bottom of the page, which takes the respondent to a lead-capture Web form.

Linhardt declined to say how much he is charging for PVS.