Richter and his company OptinRealBig.com LLC were this week removed from The SpamHaus Project’s authoritative Registry Of Known Spam Operations, according to Richter and SpamHaus.

ROKSO is the internet’s most frequently referenced directory of big spammers. It lists 200 of what SpamHaus calls hard-line spam gangs. Getting off of it means sending no unsolicited bulk email for at least six months.

To move off of ROKSO you have to fully clean up your act and be a good net citizen, Richter told ComputerWire yesterday. He added that he now wants to see the internet become a better place.

To be delisted from ROKSO, Richter had to switch to a fully confirmed opt-in mailing list model. Confirmed opt-in means people sign up for a mailing list both in an initial request and by responding to a confirmation email.

This means that his emails don’t hit as many desktops as their did before, but that the response rate is higher, and he can command a higher price per response — $5 versus the $1 he received under his previous model, he told us.

The first few months were really rough, Richter said. Long-term, we want to be a much more sustainable business, but the short-term was very painful for us.

The apparent reformation of one of the internet’s most notorious bulk emailers appears to have been driven by intense legal pressure as much as anything else.

A year ago, Richter settled a lawsuit with the office of New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer for $50,000, and agreed to sign a deal that stated he would only send email that was compliant with the US CAN-SPAM Act.

Being CAN-SPAM-compliant only requires spammers to send email with opt-out links, setting the bar far lower than SpamHaus’s hard-core policies.

But Microsoft would not let him off the hook so easily, and is still aggressively pursuing Richter and his company in the Washington courts for alleged breaches of state laws, and in the Colorado bankruptcy court.

Richter and OptinRealBig.com both filed for bankruptcy protection on March 25, one day before they were scheduled to respond to Microsoft’s motion for a summary judgment, according to court documents.

Microsoft filed a complaint in the Colorado Bankruptcy Court in late June, demanding that the court rule that Richter’s potential liability to Microsoft, up to $46m, is non-dischargeable, meaning that it cannot be eliminated through bankruptcy proceedings.

But yesterday, OptinRealBig.com and Microsoft filed a joint motion in the Colorado court, seeking a stay to any further activity while they try to work out a settlement in an alternative dispute resolution venue. The judge has yet to rule.

I’m confident, hopeful, we can make it through bankruptcy, Richter said. He’s also being sued by his insurance carrier, he said. OptinRealBig.com continues to operate while the bankruptcy case is being heard.

The company, which Richter directly and indirectly wholly owns, had current assets of $4.3m at the end of June, according to court filings. Revenue for the month of June was $4.7m and net income was $817,000, these filings state.

Richter himself has been day-trading Google Inc stock quite heavily over the last couple of months, judging from the filings. He owned roughly $1.5m of Google shares at the end of June, having previously dabbled in MCI and Martha Stewart Living.

If Richter’s business survives bankruptcy, he says he has built a legitimate business model that could last 10 years or more, based on the double opt-in principles. He adds that he believes his situation will show other spammers the way to go.

I think you’ll see a lot of people see my changes and will want to do that too… a lot of people believed you couldn’t get off of ROKSO once you were on there, he said. He said he’d had specific conversations to that effect with other bulk emailers, but declined to name them.