Discouraging the Usage of Spamhaus.org

Back in 2012, while running Xentime, we had an interesting encounter with The Spamhaus Project. They blacklisted our IP pools and labeled the company as associated with cybercriminals. The trigger was a website launched by one of our customers at stophaus.com, which openly discussed and mocked the activities of this self-proclaimed "nonprofit" organization.

The server hosting the critical website had no SMTP software installed and could not send emails at all. Nevertheless, Spamhaus demanded its removal to delist our IPs. Having found no evidence of actual spam activity, we stood by our customer.

At the time we decided to dig deeper and investigate who exactly was behind Spamhaus. The official website conveniently listed neither a phone number nor a proper physical address connected to their trademark registration — a curious choice for an organization supposedly acting in the public interest.

The Face of Spamhaus

At the center of it all was Steve Linford, the public face and driving force of the organization. The photo below, which circulated at the time, shows him in a rather... devoted pose before his collection of vintage computers.

We have always believed that the best approach to spam is education and proper technical configuration rather than outsourcing responsibility to opaque third-party organizations. Spamhaus, despite operating since 1998, never delivered measurable long-term reductions in spam volumes. Their reactive blacklisting model created dependency while doing little to address root causes.

That same year, we conducted another investigation — this time into a knife stabbing incident in Paris. Through careful analysis of a carelessly written short blog post on Twitter, we identified the perpetrator. The police were able to arrest him based on that lead.

Interestingly, while that criminal was brought to justice relatively quickly, Steve Linford continues to operate freely to this day.

This 2012 episode was one of many colorful chapters in our journey. It taught us valuable lessons about trust, power dynamics in the internet infrastructure space, and the sometimes personal nature of "justice" online. It reinforced our commitment to building transparent, reliable infrastructure instead of playing gatekeeper games.