The Spamhaus Project Tracks Spam Activities With DNS Blocklist

The Spamhaus Project tries to detect email spammers and other spam related activities. It was spearheaded by Steve Linford in 1998. Linford had himself invented the projects name Spamhaus that is an anti-spam terminology. It is a counterfeit German term for firms that spasm or deliberately provides services to spammers.

The three mostly used anti-spams DNS Block lists are taken care of by the Spamhaus Project. These Block lists include The Spamhaus Block List (SPL), The Exploits Block List (XPL) and The Policy Block List (PPL). These three Block Lists are widely used by various Internet sites and also Internet service providers to keep a check on the total quantity of spam that they take on. Although like other DSNBL their use is debatable, yet the three Block Lists together protect more than 500 million e-mail users.

Under the Spamhaus Project, the Spamhaus Block List aims at various spam sources, which could include spammers, spam support services and spam gangs. The job of the Spamhaus Block List is to put down the IP addresses of identified spammers, spam support services and spam operations. This is done by SBL by partly basing its listing on the ROKSO index of Spam gangs.

Under the Spamhaus Project, the Exploit Block List aims at the exploits of the illegal third parties. These can include open proxies and viruses/worms with built-in spam engines apart from other Trojan-horse exploits. In other words it is alike other DSNBL which lists already identified open proxies and exploited computers that are constantly used to send across viruses and spam. This is done through details gathered by the Spamhaus, The Composite Block List and the Not So Another Bogus Lists.

The Policy Block List under the Spamhaus Project is not exactly a Dialup Users List though it does serve many of the identical functions of it. Apart from listing dynamic and DHCP type IP address space, the Policy Block List also lists static assignments that shouldnt be sending emails without making arrangements beforehand. The owners of the IP address space provide most of the required data to Spamhaus.

The services of the Spamhaus Project or more precisely that of Spamhaus DSNBL is provided to the mail server operators on the Internet free of cost. It also enables large sites that handle a large number of queries to apply for the rsync-based feed of these DSNBLs. The rsync-based feed is called Data Feed by Spamhaus. The large sites can avail this Data Feed against the payment of a reasonable fee and also satisfy the criteria of not having provided services to spammers knowingly or unknowingly. Two-combined DSNBL is also provided by Spamhaus. Spamhaus has also been trademarked in the European Union. The Spamhaus Project