Although the title sounds bombastic, you have to know that the beloved blacklist spam operator cannot be forced to pay the fee, as the Spamhaus organization is not located in USA.

But, first thing first, Spamhaus was sued by a man claiming that the organization was blacklisting all of his domains for no reason whatsoever, and although Spamhaus never set foot into the US or did any business there, the Illinois District Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff and ordered Spamhaus to pay $11,715,000 in damages, Cnet News reports.

The plaintiff is e360insight and its chief David Linhardt, whom Spamhaus marked as spammers way back in 2003. Linhardt states on his website:

"Spamhaus didn't seem to care that we are an opt-in email marketing company. They didn't seem to care that the only way to get onto our mailing list was to signup for it. They didn't seem to care about the thousands of customers would not receive order confirmation messages or other email messages they requested. They didn't care about the lost dollars in legitimate commerce or about the employees that lost their jobs as a result."

He also lets the reader know Spamhaus has turned against his company in a 'jihad' manner, blocking virtually any e-mails coming from IP's even remotely related to him.

On the other hand, Spamhaus says Linhard is nothing more or less than a spammer. The organization also mentions that spammers often threaten IPS's, blacklist operators and mail anti-spam vendors with lawsuits in order to frighten them. Spamhaus states:

"Although meaningless for Spamhaus, which as a British organization not subject to Illinois court orders is listing Linhardt's company E360 Insight on its SBL spam blocklist as usual, the Illinois ruling shows that U.S. courts can be bamboozled by spammers with ease. As spamming is illegal in the United Kingdom, an Illinois court ordering a British organization to stop blocking incoming Illinois spam in Britain goes contrary to U.K. law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place."

As I see it, it is a rather easy question to answer whether Linhard and e360insight are spammers or not. If he has ever sent out unsolicited bulk e-mail, then he is indeed a spammer. One person who received a spam e-mail from Linhard's company is enough to put him down. I didn't find any evidence of this on any of the websites, but hopefully we'll soon find out the truth.