• The New York Times, Tuesday, October 17, 2006 11:30 AM

Call it online vigilante justice. But if you're an email marketer, make sure you don't end up on the wrong list. The Spamhaus project is a big list of blacklists you don't want to be on if you're hawking your own or a client's products via email. Run and maintained by a group of anonymous volunteers, the Spamhaus Project aims to identify spam and help Internet service providers and businesses filter out the Web's worst spam perpetrators.

However, E360insight.com--a small marketer that claims its practices are legitimate--wants to have Spamhaus' URL suspended until it complies with a September ruling that ordered Spamhaus to pay $11.7 million in damages to the marketing firm and post a notice on the site saying that E360 was not a spammer. The suspension is unlikely, as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, says it doesn't have such jurisdiction.

Spamhaus is one of many volunteer spam-busters across the globe that tries to stamp out the practice of sending unsolicited bulk emails--how Spamhaus defines the problem. The problem is that international authorities have yet to agree on the definition of spam, which leaves anti-spam groups vulnerable to legal challenges.

For example, prior consent is required in most European countries before a sender can transmit bulk email--but not in the U.S. and Japan. Nevertheless, Spamhaus and its ilk are making an impact: of the 203 billion email messages that were prevented from being delivered in the last quarter of 2005, 61 billion were blocked by blacklisting, according to a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

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