we want to offer a chance to people who were attacked to respond in a final emailto correct the accusations and have the last word
For anyone who might have even the slightest suspicions about
Elad's accusations, as I mentioned, I had attended the M3WAAG
conference in Atlanta in 2015, and MANY very important people in
the email hosting, ESP, ISP, and spam filtering industries saw me
there. I had extensive face-to-face conversations with the
following people: Tobias Herkula (Optivo, now with w/Cyren), Terry
Zinc (then Microsoft, now w/Facebook), Tim Starr (Maropost), Alex
Marinkovic (then Cox, now w/Cloudmark/Proofpoint), Bart Bailey
(Earthlink, now w/Windstream), Mary Youngblood (then Teradata, now
w/Adobe), Jaren Angerbauer (Proofpoint), Adam Wosotowsky (McAfee),
Adrien Gendre (Vade), and I had dinner with the ENTIRE SURBL team
(except Jeff Chan missed that conference - but everyone else from
SURBL was there - including Raymond Dijkxhoorn & Joe Wein).
Tobias was assigned to be my "mentor" since that was my first
M3WAAG conference - and I joked in a room full of people about
how I was "having trouble finding my mentor, but I heard that he
has a red mohawk" (or whatever crazy color he had dyed his hair at
that time) - while Tobias was there on the other side of the same
room (as if it would be hard to spot him). Tobias and I had a
great conversation during a bus ride where we compared the
financial systems of Germany and the US. He was down on the US's
minimum wage being so low - but I was able to future out that
Germany has an apprenticeship system that is very similar, and
that neutered many of his best arguments! (it was a friendly
debate!) Also, in a fascinating face-to-face conversation with
Mary Youngblood, I found out that Mary was the person who actually
coined the phrase, "phishing", when she worked in Earthlink's spam
filtering department years earlier, and had to come up with a term
to satisfy a journalist who was writing at story on this new type
of spam. A highlight of my life was walking to a restaurant with
Joe Wein of SURBL and "comparing notes". The whole experience was
AMAZING! BTW - if you ever meet Terry Zink - get him to show you
his card tricks. They are AMAZING! And, to this day, Tim Starr and
I are very good friends! (on facebook, we chat about politics and
other topics almost daily)
I also occasionally attended a few much smaller regional email
"meet-ups" in the Atlanta area that were put together by Greg
Kraios (then 250OK, now w/Validity) and Chris Arrendale (then
Inbox Pros, now w/Trendline Interactive)
...there I met face-to-face with people such as Joey Rutledge
(Mailchimp), Patrick Knight (Adobe), Nancy Harris (Sailthru), Tim
Draegen (dmarcian), Taylor Jones (MessageGears), Geralmy Swint
(then Trend Micro, now Adobe) Laura Atkins (Word to the Wise) -
although my conversation with Laura was one-time and brief. Also,
I think I saw Geralmy Swint at *both* M3WAAG and these Atlanta
meetups?
As I mentioned, I don't get out much - but ALL these people
mentioned had face-to-face conversations with me. EVERY. SINGLE.
ONE.
UNLIKE me, MOST of these people go to these types of conferences
all the time, year-after-year, and they therefore know the
Spamhaus team much better than me - and I've seen it mentioned
that "Rob Shultz" does presentations at conferences like this (at
least occasionally?). So I THINK (???) many of them have seen BOTH
me and "Rob Shultz" face to face - so if anyone still has any
doubts - ask one of them - there is probably someone you know on
this list who would get a good laugh out of this too!
I'm not the "liar" in this conversation. This SHOULD end all
lingering doubts, if anyone had any.
-- Rob McEwen https://www.invaluement.com