Upon hearing the news that SpamCop had been bought by a company called IronPort I was a little concerned that they might change the way it operates.  The announcement on the front page of SpamCop assures it that this won’t happen, and that IronPort will beef up SpamCop’s defenses against DDOS attacks because IronPort relies on SpamCop’s blocklists.  However, this article worries me a bit. 

In addition to selling spam filtering services (and hardware), IronPort also builds specialized hardware for sending out millions of spam emails at a time (one source quoted in the article called them ‘spam cannons’).  This does not exactly give me a warm fuzzy feeling inside as someone who has paid for SpamCop’s services.  I suppose it remains to be seen just how long IronPort will resist the temptation to futz with SpamCop’s blocklists to get one of its slimy spammer clients off of it.  Of course, reputation is key in the antispam game, so IronPort will have a lot to lose if it scares away customers by interfering with the integrity of SpamCop.