At 08:26 AM 5/16/02, Sean Brunnock wrote: >I think it's odd that newspapers love to run stories about mailmen >who toss mail in the trash rather than deliver it, but you never hear >about ISPs that play games with email. > >Have you folks had similar experiences? Should we do something >about it? Or am I venting in the wrong place?
Here are a few of my current pet peeves: 1. The services that are the most difficult for us to deal with are NOT just in the ISP or mail service business, but also in the content business. Consider where things get sticky -- we handle news delivery for one major network and a few other media outlets with wide reaches. Can you say there is no conflict of interest when possibly the largest ISP worldwide is under the same ownership as a major news network AND this ISP is restricting mail delivery that its subscribers have ASKED to receive? The issue of anti-competition laws certainly come to mind. Especially when there is no legitimate reason for the problems other than that it is to "generally" combat spam. 2. Content blocking by ISPs is really getting out of hand. We've seen some ISPs even block on the word "un$ubscribe" being included in emails. 3. ISPs who black list entire quadrants of IP addresses. Since we also host email accounts, I can fully understand the need for ISPs to be proactive in anti-spam measures. We average about 3 emails being rejected because of blocks for spam in place for every email that gets through. I estimate that overall, between email accounts and lists, about 80% of our incoming bandwidth usage is Spam. Ironically enough, I've found that the same ISPs and mail providers who take the most extreme measures in blocking or dropping legitimate email are the ones responsible for at least half of the incoming SPAM that doesn't get stopped by our filters. Sharon Tucci http://www.listhost.net
