Where did Spamhaus come from?
Part One - Where did they come from.
The story of how we started blocking spam at the network level is, in part, a story of what happens when social conscience meets big money in the global marketplace. It starts over 13 years ago with two guys, Paul Vixie and Dave Rand, who started keeping a list of IP addresses that were sending them unsolicited, unwanted and other objectionable material in email form.
By 1996 their list had become known as the Real-time Blackhole List, or the acronym RBL, and they had founded a non for profit organization called Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) and were publishing their list as a DNS based service to network managers anywhere on the internet. Using MAPS, email administrators could now use network layer DNS checks to hang up on incoming email connections from spammers, effectively blowing them off before they downloaded the email and paid for the bandwidth. Imagine the reception such a system got from the fledgling spamming community!
Rand and Vixie didn’t see how it could be wrong to publish a blacklist of known spamming IP addresses on the internet, but drew an ever stronger response as the effectiveness of the system grew. In 1998 they appointed high profile lawyer, Anne Mitchell, as Director of Legal and Public Affairs to mange the legal load they were generating. By 2000, they had had received many lawsuits threats, two of which can still be seen on the original MAPS web page entitled How to Sue MAPS
By 2001, the financial pressure of both growing a network to support the ever increasing load, and carrying the weight of legal defense changed their organization model. They began to charge subscription fees as a way to pay their bills. In 2004 the organization was sold to a commercial entity, Kelkea Inc., an anti spam vendor founded by Dave Rand. Then finally in 2005 Trend Micro Inc. acquired all the assets of Kelkea and MAPS, the pioneer of network based spam detection had ceased to exist as we knew it.
This story highlights the two biggest themes in network based spam detection.
Firstly, DNS based network blocking of spammers is an extremely effective way to get rid of a very large percentage of spam. Both stopping the spam and saving data charges at the same time. Secondly, almost all providers of these services started life as not for profit community service style organizations. Together, these two salient facts have forced all of them to change their models, either by charging for their services or entering into various commercial partnerships.
That brings us neatly to Spamhaus, which was founded in 1998 by Steve Linford using the same core technical ideas of a DNS based central lookup system for tracking spammers on the internet that Rand and Vixie had pioneered with MAPS. In my part two post I’ll explain how Spamhaus operate today and how they ended up in Australia.
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