Trying to keep mail-servers running and keeping up with the different spam clearing houses different policies that kept changing without notice was a lot of work back then.
Once you got black-listed getting removed wasn't always an easy process no matter how quickly you tried fix whatever caused it. Methods of communicating were not always available and when it were, responses were not always helpful or even very polite.
I haven't managed mail servers for over ten years, and really hope that the conditions for being included on a blacklist and process for getting removed is more transparent by now.
Given the amount of trust that most people running mail servers are putting into the different blacklists organizations like spamhaus get a lot of power over the internet.
Judging from my experience with spam clearing houses it looks like that power have once more corrupted when I read the news stories about cyberbunker.
We need places like cyberbunker to keep the internet free and open. When all the pr0n, w4r3z and 1337 stuff have been cleaned out from the internet the infrastructure to stop anything at will on the internet will be in place and functional.
I wonder what would be the next thing to be removed from the internet?