Spamhaus arrive down under?
Part Two - Spamhaus hit town
In 2004 Spamhaus moved from a free model to a subscription model, as their chosen response to the pressures discussed in my part one post. This is explained on their web site faqs under the question Why is there a charge for this service?
We pick up the story around March 2009 when a company called MxTools started contacting a few of the largest MailMarshal customers in Australia informing them their usage of the Spamhaus services were not paid for and requesting payment or their usage would be either blocked or choked. Shortly after this time we discovered what they meant by the term ‘choke’. Without going into the technical detail, the practical results meant MailMarshal would have big delivery delays and start to queue large volumes of inbound email. In large sites this could tens of thousands of emails. These events triggered a frenzy of activity for us as we tried to get some answers from all parties as to what was going on. Aside from the queuing email, we had a bunch of wider questions, including, who is MxTools, why was this an issue now, how much will this cost and isn’t this an issue for Marshal? What we discovered was something like this.
In the years between 2004 and 2009, although Spamhaus was not free they simply did not look for licensing fees down under. Their efforts we put into the larger players in the USA and Europe. So we’d all been getting a free ride without knowing it for years. Those days were simply ending. Spamhaus themselves weren’t really setup as a commercial operations and didn’t see their core task as collecting license fees. So they had approached MxTools to act as a commercial partner so they could focus on building a robust anti spam service whilst not running out of money. Because Spamhaus only set out to cover the cost of running such a large network operation the fees were very low when compared with the costs of commercial anti spam solutions and also the data charges that were saved by using Spamhaus. The guys at MxTools assured us Spamhaus had held discussions with Marshal about entering into an OEM contract to cover all MailMarshal users. Marshal confirmed as much to us and that their position was if users wished to use that functionality they should pay any third party fees, the same as was the arrangement with other plug-ins like anti virus and anti spyware. They decided therefore not to enter any vendor contract with Spamhaus.
At this stage of the proceedings we felt very much the meat in the sandwich. Spamhaus, as represented by MxTools seemed to have a cut and dried case, our customers were using Spamhaus and it was saving them real money in direct data charges. Even if most of them were blissfully unaware as we had been. It was a feature that had been shipping as part of the ruleset of MailMarshal for years. Marshal seemed not to see eye to eye with us on this one, taking the position that if customers wanted to use third party services then they would simply pay for them as they did with their various virus scanners. Our customers wanted to know why it was their problem, and if they had paid their yearly maintenance why was anyone turning up asking for more money - to them I’m sure we smelled like a rat.
In a panic, we started to look very closely at all the DNS based services that were out there, how they worked and whether there was a alternative we could move everyone to. We looked at other providers like MAPS, SORBS and Spamcop. As we assembled the research it became apparent that all these providers were not created equal, some had block rates lower than 50% and other more like 62%, but with significant false positive rates. So they would wrongly blocks emails from legitimate sources; which we knew from years of support was a serious issue. There was also talk of what happened when these guys got attacked by spammers, which happened from time to time. This is when we discovered the depth of problems these guys had, with spammers attacking their networks on one front, and getting sued on the other.
In the end, we found Spamhaus stood out head and shoulders above them all. They had a huge robust network design, with 60 DNS servers spread over 18 countries and had never suffered an outage in 14 years. Spamhaus was famous for it’s industry low false positive rates - no one had or has a more accurate list. Their business model, although a shock when they banged on our door, looked like it was sustainable and they wouldn’t be the next DNS service failure in the world. And they weren’t owned by a large multinational, but were a true independent. In the final wash up, we wanted to be running Spamhaus with our customer base because it was the best.
So WebSecure entered into serious discussions with MxTools. We said they couldn’t just randomly start turning off our user base and causing serious email outages, the technician support implications alone were a potential nightmare. An understanding was reached that they wouldn’t contact Australian and New Zealand based customers without consulting with us and in return we would raise the issue of Spamhaus licensing as every customer’s yearly maintenance came around. Whatever the customer decided to do, either to license or not, we would communicate to MxTools and Spamhaus would turn off those customers who didn’t want the service anymore. As a result, WebSecure became a Spamhaus reseller through MxTools so we could supply the licensing in Australian dollars and control the administration.
In part three of this series I want to look at the mechanics & performance of Spamhaus and into specific setups with MailMarshal.
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