STEVE: Real-time blacklists are essentially lists of known or believed spammers.

In 2005, an AOL employee, was convicted of stealing America Online's 92 million screen names and selling them to a known spammer.

The site also contains a discussion forum about spam, links to spam-fighting resources, a list of known spammers and a well-written Frequently Asked Questions section.

Its goal is to list IP addresses belonging to known spammers, spam operations, and spam-support services.

The SBL's listings are partially based on the ROKSO index of known spammers.

We also run Rokso [the Register of Known Spam Organizations], with 180 known spammers.

In the following years, they created multiple datacenters, in different cities, and then surrounded the system with a pre-filter that leveraged known spammer's domains and I.P. addresses.

Blacklists, also called "block lists" or "blackhole lists," are lists of Internet addresses associated with known spammers that are used to block all incoming e-mail from those addresses.

"Spews is very aggressive," said Steve Linford, who runs the Spamhaus Project, another organization, based in Britain, that runs a list of known spammers.

The program worked using users' computers to perform a DDOS attack on the web servers of known spammers.