Anti-Spam getting out of hand

Last week, I reported that Hotmail had blocked all email from Plusnet whose servers had apparently been 'blacklisted' for sending out 'spam'.

Following representations from Plusnet, this ban was lifted though Plusnet users were left unable to communicate with Hotmail users for something like 48 hours.

It may well be that some unwanted email was sent out via an individual Plusnet account but the entire user base suffered as an unintended consequence of the Hotmail anti-spam measures.

I had a similar problem several years back when I was unable to communicate with an important customer for several days because their spam-filtering service had blocked email from an entire Pipex server.

Plusnet themselves operate optional spam filtering which can either delete suspected email directly with the alternative of marking the item with [SPAM] included in the subject—I much prefer the second option because it identifies most (but not all) of the spam but still allows you to spot the occasional non-spam email.

Unfortunately, Plusnet have now introduced an initial filtering stage which deletes email based on the 'reputation' of the sender—this is exactly the kind of filtering which gave rise to Plusnet emails being blocked by Hotmail.

You don't actually get the chance to decide whether the items intercepted at this stage have been correctly identified as junk mail so the only way to prevent 'false positives' is to turn off spam filtering altogether.

Turning to my Typepad blogs, I have recently experienced some difficulty in setting up a new author and discovered, by trial and error (mainly error), that the recipient's domain name host (123-reg.co.uk) is apparently blocking administrative messages from Typepad.

A search of the 123-reg 'help' pages produced nothing about spam though there is a reference elsewhere to 'email defence' which appears to be non-configurable—i.e. you get it whether you want it or not.

According to 123-Reg, their email defence system is "one of the most comprehensive and effective email threat protection service on the market" which captures 98% of spam—as a confirmed cynic, I have to wonder exactly how they measure the 2% that escapes their notice and gets through.

It's a well--established fact that '83.75% of statistics are made up on the spot'.

In my experience, and despite multiple levels of anti-spam protection, most people still seem to get an awful lot of junk mail which, at the end of the day, is a bit of a nuisance but it generally doesn't do any harm—protection against malicious software is, of course, essential but that is a separate issue.

To read the earnest advertising of some Internet Service Providers, you would think that junk email has become one of the greatest threats to mankind, second only to 'global warming' and well-ahead of 'swine flu'.

With everybody jumping 'on the bandwagon' to blacklist everybody else, a far more-serious problem is the loss of email that you actually want.

Comments

[Father Brian]

Well said. Unfortunately I fear things will get worse before they get better, if they ever do. The anti-spam industry seems to be growing by the day.

If the example of the anti-virus industry is anything to go by, things will only get worse. There was a suggestion a few years ago that McAfee, Norton and such actually encouraged virus-writing. If they didn't exist there'd be nothing for those saddos to challenge.