Spamhaus...

Thu Feb 18 17:50:59 UTC 2010

>>> On 2/18/2010 at 2:40 AM, Michelle Sullivan <matthew at sorbs.net> wrote:
> Laczo, Louis wrote:
>> Folks,
>>
>> I'm looking for comments / suggestions / opinions from any providers that 
> have been contacted by spamhaus about excessive queries originating from 
> their DNS resolvers, typically, as a proxy for customers. I know that certain 
> large DNS providers (i.e. google and level3) have either been banned or have 
> voluntarily blocked spamhaus queries by their resolvers. We're currently in 
> discussion with spamhaus and I wanted to see how others may have handled 
> this.
>>   
> 
> They seem to be doing that a lot of late.  They also contacted my
> employer and demanded $100k/yr(?) for having a "Use Spamhaus RBL" in our
> software.  Next version will not have the ability to query Spamhaus
> unless a user configures it themselves in the "Custom RBL" settings.
> 
> 
> Michelle
> 
> ? = could have been more, not sure without checking with the CEO, result
> was the same.

We received such a message from a Spamhaus Datafeed reseller
and eventually had our DNS servers blocked. What angered me was
that I analyzed our usage, and we were well below the thresholds
and met the TOS published at the Spamhaus website for no-cost use.
However, they said we had to subscribe to the Datafeed despite
that because we have a Barracuda appliance.

To me, it sounds like Barracuda customers are being singled
out in some conflict between Barracuda Networks and Spamhaus.
Spamhaus (via the reseller, MXTools) is leaning on Barracuda
customers hoping that they'll lean on Barracuda Networks so
that Barracuda Networks will do a deal at the corporate level
with Spamhaus.

Spamhaus does some good work, but being used as a pawn in
some conflict between vendors doesn't feel nice. And I want to
know how they figured out we had a Barracuda.