Spamhaus, a prominent volunteer-run anti-spam group based in London, UK, may have its Internet address shut down following a court order in the US. This new ruling follows in the footsteps of last month’s $11.7 million judgement ordered against Spamhaus by the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

The original ruling was made in Illinois in response to a lawsuit by David Linhard of e360Insight, a firm specialising in online mass marketing. Spamhaus listed the company in its database of known spammers, thus preventing their messages from reaching users of Spamhaus’ black list. The anti-spam organisation did not challenge the original claims, merely saying that a court order from a US judge would not be enforceable in the UK. However, having ignored the first court order to pay damages and remove e360Insight from the black list, Spamhaus now faces a more serious threat. The same US court has now called on the organisations that register Spamhaus on the Internet to suspend their service. This means that the Spamhaus.org domain is now under threat, as both ICANN and Tucows will have to mull over their actions on whether to comply.

According to Spamhaus the shutdown order could threaten the inboxes of millions of Internet users, as billions of spam messages could end up being unleashed onto the net. In fact, Spamhaus figures suggest that up to 50 billion daily junk emails could be let out to roam the Internet. Currently the project helps to stop some 8 to 10 billion junk emails daily. Spamhaus itself does not do any blocking; it simply provides a blacklist used by providers and users alike. Currently Microsoft, major ISPs, corporations and governments use this blacklist to stop spam entering their networks. It has been suggested that the new court order was issued to get the attention of Spamhaus and force it to make in appearance in the Illinois court, which it has always been reluctant to do. In fact, Spamhaus has always been extremely critical of the US justice system, claiming in the FAQ section on its site that US lawsuits are frivolous and often used to simply harass opponents. When the original ruling against Spamhaus was made in September, the project published a message on its site pointing out that the Illinois court has no jurisdiction over the activities of a UK organisation. It also says that the judge in the original case was easily “bamboozled” and “no proof is required in order to obtain judgements over clearly foreign entities.” However, Spamhaus later softened its defiant stance and declared that it was going to appeal the $11.7 million sentence in order to “stamp out firther attempts by spammers to abuse the US court system in this way.”