The Spamhaus Project is a largely volunteer effort founded by Steve Linford in 1998 that aims to track e-mail spammers and spam-related activity. It is named for the anti-spam jargon term spamhaus, a pseudo-German expression for an ISP or other firm which willingly provides service to spammers.

Spamhaus DNSBLs

Spamhaus is responsible for two of the most widely-used DNSBLs in the anti-spam business -- the Spamhaus Block List and Exploits Block List. Many ISPs and other Internet sites use these free services to reduce the amount of spam they take on. The SBL and XBL collectively serve over 260 million e-mail users.

The Spamhaus Block List (SBL) targets "verified spam sources (including spammers, spam gangs and spam support services)." Its goal is to list IP addresses belonging to known spammers, spam operations, and spam-support services. [1] (http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl-rationale.html) The SBL's listings are partially based on the ROKSO index of "spam gangs", for which see below.

The Exploits Block List (XBL) targets "illegal 3rd party exploits, including open proxies [...], worms/viruses with built-in spam engines, and other types of trojan-horse exploits." That is to say, like many other DNSBLs it is a list of known open proxies and exploited computers being used to send spam and viruses. The SBL includes listings gathered by Spamhaus as well as by two contributing DNSBL operations -- the Composite Blocking List (CBL) and the Blitzed IRC network's Open Proxy Monitor (BOPM) list. [2] (http://www.spamhaus.org/xbl/index.lasso)

Spamhaus's DNSBLs are offered as a free public service to mail server operators on the Internet. ISPs and other large sites doing extremely large numbers of queries can also carry an rsync-based feed of these DNSBLs at a moderate fee.

Register of Known Spam Operations

The Spamhaus Registry of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) is a database of "hard-core spam gangs" -- spammers and spam operations who have been terminated from three or more ISPs due to spamming. The ROKSO list is not a DNSBL; it is, rather, a directory of publicly-sourced information about these persons and their business and criminal activities.

As Spamhaus is operated out of the United Kingdom, it is subject to the U.K. Data Protection Act which restricts its ability to publish private information legally. For this reason, ROKSO publishes only information gathered from public sources such as newspapers, court records, incorporation filings, and other public records. Spamhaus also keeps additional information on spammers for disclosure only to law enforcement agencies.

Also see

• E-mail spam
• Stopping e-mail abuse

External links

• The Spamhaus Project (http://www.spamhaus.org)
• Spamhaus China (http://www.spamhaus.cn)