Libel case?

[glasshat]

What is the name of your state? Florida

Hi, my name is John Josef and I am co-owner of a corporation Glass Hat Software Inc.. We do business in software development, video game development, and other multimedia creation. You can observe our website here: www.glass-hat.com.

I have a complaint against a service called SORBS (www.sorbs.net), which stands for Spam and Open Relay Blocking System. Recently my business partner was applying for a job using our company email. He was not able to apply for the job because of this SORBS service blocking our IP addresses from sending mail to a specific customer. This incured a possible loss for us, and has made me wonder... how many other clients have not been able to contact us or get in touch with us because of this SORBS service?

I am interested if there is any legal case of libel against this SORBS service since they have made our company look bad by saying we are a mass email spamming company. I will let you know there are only 4 active email addresses on the server that are capable of sending mail. Our email out-going server does not send more than 8-10 emails in an entire day among all the email accounts, if even that. It is a secured server and there is NO WAY that we are spamming ANYONE. We are a respectable company that has done business with a number of companies, and this stain on our name makes me very angry.

Thanks for any info about what I might be able to do.
John Josef

 

[seniorjudge]

What is the name of your state? Florida

Hi, my name is John Josef and I am co-owner of a corporation Glass Hat Software Inc.. We do business in software development, video game development, and other multimedia creation. You can observe our website here: www.glass-hat.com.

I have a complaint against a service called SORBS (www.sorbs.net), which stands for Spam and Open Relay Blocking System. Recently my business partner was applying for a job using our company email. He was not able to apply for the job because of this SORBS service blocking our IP addresses from sending mail to a specific customer. This incured a possible loss for us, and has made me wonder... how many other clients have not been able to contact us or get in touch with us because of this SORBS service?

I am interested if there is any legal case of libel against this SORBS service since they have made our company look bad by saying we are a mass email spamming company. I will let you know there are only 4 active email addresses on the server that are capable of sending mail. Our email out-going server does not send more than 8-10 emails in an entire day among all the email accounts, if even that. It is a secured server and there is NO WAY that we are spamming ANYONE. We are a respectable company that has done business with a number of companies, and this stain on our name makes me very angry.

Thanks for any info about what I might be able to do.
John Josef

I am interested if there is any legal case of libel against this SORBS service since they have made our company look bad by saying we are a mass email spamming company.

Not even close.

 

[glasshat]

Okay thanks anyway

 

[EvilWizard]

Glasshat you might want to check that you are not being used as an open relay. Just because you aren't sending out a lot of emails doesn't mean that someone else isn't using your server as a relay for their spam, which in turn would get you blocked. And yes this is a common mistake admins make. I worked for one certain govt. organization as a CND guy and after sniffing some traffic we discovered our admins had misconfigured our servers and we were being used as a relay (and subsequently blacklisted on certain sites...)

 

[glasshat]

Glasshat you might want to check that you are not being used as an open relay. Just because you aren't sending out a lot of emails doesn't mean that someone else isn't using your server as a relay for their spam, which in turn would get you blocked. And yes this is a common mistake admins make. I worked for one certain govt. organization as a CND guy and after sniffing some traffic we discovered our admins had misconfigured our servers and we were being used as a relay (and subsequently blacklisted on certain sites...)

I am 100% positive the mail server is not open relay. It uses POSTFIX smtp server and has the correct configuration to only allow secured mail to be sent from it. On top of this, the SORBS support people showed me their "proof" of our spam, which was entirely incorrect and invalid. This was their response:

http://dnsbl.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml?209.130.174.201
Database of servers sending to spamtrap addresses
Netblock: 209.130.174.0/24 (209.130.174.0-209.130.174.255)
Record Created: Wed Aug 3 11:02:11 2005 GMT
Record Updated: Fri Oct 28 11:34:53 2005 GMT
Additional Information: from iswebmarketing.com (iswebmarketing.com
[209.130.174.154]) by (Dan).spamtrap.server (8.10.2/8.10.2) with ESMTP
id j734Zae16369 for ; Tue, 2 Aug 2005 23:35:37 -0500
Currently active and flagged to be published in DNS[/QUOTE]

Our IP address range is 209.130.174.201-205, which does not fall in the IP they have listed as being a spamming address, so I requested that they remove my IP immediately since their records are incorrect. On top of all this, I have logs sent to me everyday about email statistics, how many recieved, how many sent, and how many relayed.

 

[BelizeBreeze]

You still do not have a case.

 

[glasshat]

Just curious. What are your qualifications to be giving legal advice? I know spammers and also spam blockers are under a lot of scrutiny for over-blocking people from conducting business. This is exactly what I experienced. I do not understand how you can be so quick to say there is no case.

It seems like a violation of my rights that some, un-involvedd party, I have never contacted before can tell me I am not allowed to communicate with them.