Spam, the Nazi hunter and Citizen Joe

The fight against junk e-mail is never pretty, but what happens when a spam-fighter messes with the wrong party?

By Brian McWilliams

Sept. 7, 2004 | Over the years, junk e-mailers have engaged in countless legal battles with the operators of spam-blocking services. But the latest courtroom clash over the legality of such filters promises to become especially ugly.

Later this month, a jury in Orange County (California) Superior Court is scheduled to decide whether Joe Jared, operator of the free OsiruSoft Open Relay Spam Stopper, negligently blacklisted Pallorium, a private investigation firm that claims it never sent a speck of spam.

A spam blacklist (or "block list") service prevents mail from people or companies deemed to be spammers from reaching anyone who subscribes to that service. Those who end up on such blacklists are rarely happy about it, and in this case, the aggrieved party became hopping mad.

"I am ferociously supportive of legitimate efforts to fight spam. But this was not a responsible or technically sensible way to do it," says Steven Rambam, Brooklyn-based Pallorium's senior director.

Rambam gained fame in 1996 for tracking Nazi war criminals and later for revealing that Elvis Presley had Jewish ancestors. He accuses Jared of erroneously including Pallorium's e-mail server in OsiruSoft's database in July 2003. Rambam says there's no proof his firm ever sent spam, or even that its e-mail server was an "open relay" exploited by junk e-mailers to disguise their spams. The listing was obviously a mistake, according to Rambam, but Jared refused repeated requests to correct it.

As a result, Pallorium had difficulty invoicing clients, sending reports and otherwise communicating via e-mail for several weeks until it moved its e-mail server to a new network, he claims.

"Joe Jared cost me a lot of money. He was essentially putting us out of business. But if he had chosen to act responsibly, this lawsuit would not have happened," says Rambam.

Jared, who refers to himself online as Citizen Joe, says he never made a dime from the OsiruSoft filter service. (Besides working as a contract programmer, his day job is running a small business that designs custom shoe inserts known as orthotics.) Jared shuttered the anti-spam service in August 2003, after suffering months of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks aimed at preventing his blacklist service from working effectively.

In court documents, Jared suggests that the DDoS attacks, which he blames on spammers, were likely the cause of Pallorium's difficulty in contacting OsiruSoft or using the site's automated system for correcting mistaken listings.

Rambam counters that the dramatic manner in which Jared shut down his service further illustrates what he considers Jared's "gleeful negligence." On Aug. 26, 2003, Jared placed a notice at his site instructing users to stop using OsiruSoft's data. To drive home the point, Jared configured the service to block all addresses on the Internet. The result was a period of chaos for many users of the filter.

Pallorium isn't the first organization to complain about collateral damage from Jared's service. In 2001, OsiruSoft was criticized for blacklisting a San Francisco arts group that was operating an open e-mail server -- even though there was no evidence the server had ever been abused by spammers.

Nor is Rambam's lawsuit against Jared his first attempt to squelch unflattering Internet postings about him. Since 1997, Rambam has been involved in litigation against the Jewish Defense Organization and others for defamation.

"By the end of the year, I will have a judgment against Joe Jared, and I'm going to enforce the judgment because he's been so nasty to me," says Rambam.

Next page: Will Rambam's suit have a chilling effect on other attempts to stop spam?