Someone has started sending out emails that purport to be advertisements for anti-spam services from Spamhaus. This is presumably intended as a joe-job, but it's a little difficult to see what they think they can achieve.

The messages contain a chunk of text about what Spamhaus is and does, using copy lifted from the About Spamhaus page on the Spamhaus website. After listing the services provided by Spamhaus, it concludes:

You can get MUCH MORE if you contact us:

and then gives one of two addresses, one in Geneva and one in West Malling in the United Kingdom. The Geneva address is the registered address of Spamhaus, the West Malling address seems to be a former address used by Ultradesign, a company founded by Steve Linford of Spamhaus. Linford comments that the phone number given in this variant is outdated, but was used in earlier joe jobs by two spammers currently facing racketeering charges.

Other than that, there are few clues to the identity of the senders. The 'From:' addresses appear to be the usual spammer inventions — random names at real domains — while the subject lines follow the 'three or four random words' pattern formerly used by stock spammers but now more popular on pills spams, i.e. on do bartlesville, is delevan to widding and so on. The sending hosts appear, unsurprisingly, to be zombies. The addresses targeted so far look to be addresses that were originally collected by mail-harvesting malware that scours browser caches and mail files on infected PCs for email addresses.

It's not clear what the spammers are trying to achieve. I doubt that this campaign will cause the phone to ring off the hook at Spamhaus HQ, and if the intent is to create a perception of Spamhaus as a company aggressively touting for custom — perhaps with a view to influencing the outcome of any lawsuits Spamhaus may happen to be involved in — the transparent nature of the forgery is hardly going to help much here. Truly, spammers move in mysterious ways.