[Love Calm Quiet]

I just discovered spamhaus ( http://www.spamhaus.org/newsindex.lasso ) through a BBC story, and was astonished to discovered that their latest article alleges that MCI is *knowingly* hosting:

"So where is this stealth proxy spamware sold and distributed from? For Send Safe the answer is, www.send-safe.com, hosted by MCI Worldcom. "

Do any of the rest of you find this as outrageous as I do? (esp.: what about those who are MCI customers?)

Do you think that whoever (Verizon? Qwest?) gobbles up MCI will continue to tolerate such?

Or does someone want to come forward and defend MCI against the charges?

[SystemPreffs]

While I agree that the behavior documented by spamhaus.org is pretty outrageous, note that the bottom of the article has an update:

"Update: 2005-02-26
After extensive pressure, MCI finally relented and let go of send-safe.com."

It sounds like spamhaus did good work in continuing their pressure to end this year-long spam-apologist behavior by MCI Worldcom.

I don't know what MCI has stilled failed to rectify, but the spamhaus stats page still lists MIC as #1 among the 10 worst spam service ISPs:

http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics.lasso

(with sbc.com secon and comcast.net third)

I wonder what their stock holder & customers think about that?

[anonymhind]

Sheesh! even Verizon makes the top ten. I don't know how spamhaus gets their info - or tries to pressure these megaliths to change practices, but I say... Godspeed!

[Scotttheking]

The article is of course biased.
MCI has data centers, where you put your servers and connect to their bandwidth. Anyone can host anything.
What happened is enough pressure was put on them to cancel their contract with a customer, due to the negative publicity.
This presents a slippery slope, because anti porn crusaders could do the same thing, etc. It could very well lead to censorship of ideas by pressuring hosting places to refuse service.
The company did nothing illegal, they weren't spammers. Yes, their software is spam software, but writing it is in no way illegal.

--Scott