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You better believe they do. Some of the big ones have been
the target of
multiple lawsuits.
Perhaps best to leave the running of such servers to hard to pin down
groups such as SPEWS, eh?
Not really, some of the lawsuits were entirely justified. One blacklist
listed its own ISP when they demanded payment of unpaid bills.
Sure there were also lawsuits brought by spammers, filed by attorneys
who failed the NY bar under interesting circumstances etc. But it is
simply not true that every case has been of this type. The knee-jerk
reaction of defending anyone who calls themself a spam stopper gives the
blacklists a free ride they don't deserve.
The structural problem is that defending a lawsuit is very expensive and
none of the blacklists have adequate resources to defend against them.
So a 'dow-corning' type legal attack where the sheer number of suits
brought pushes the defendant into bankruptcy regardless of the merits is
a real risk. But not all of the suits brought are without merit.
If a blacklist takes it into their head to list my connection under the
idiotic theory of 'collateral damage' they are very likely to receive a
lawsuit for contractual interference. Try it sometime it really works.
There is a reason MAPS settled many of those early lawsuits, the
companies that brought them were not selling penis potions or the like.
The big problem with the blacklists is that they demand that the world
be accountable to them but they absolutely refuse to be accounable to
anyone but themselves. They make up the rules, they decide how to
implement them, they refuse to be held accountable for the consequences.
I have yet to see anyone say that they would use SPEWS as an actual
blacklist. It does get used in some scoring systems, but anyone using it
for real would lose much of their legitimate email. For all the net
knows SPEWS could be run by a spammer, they could take their spam
sources off the list whenever they want to spam but list the addresses
of their competition.
I think that the blacklist idea has pretty much run its course at this
point. Filtering is a much more powerfull idea. The 'blacklists' used by
the big ISPs today are internal lists that are simply IP addresses that
have been the source of large quantities of mail tagged as spam by the
filters.
Phill