Spamcop & Other Filter
Information
What is a spamming filter?
It appears that a new round of spam filters have cropped up
on the Internet. A spam filter is a service that some ISP’s use. These
services tell the individual ISP who to accept e-mail from.
How does it work?
When you send an e-mail to a remote ISP, the remote ISP
first checks this list. If the list tells them not to accept the e-mail, you
will receive a message saying that you have been blacklisted. This has nothing
to do with an individual account, only with the entire domain sending the
e-mail.
What can Pioneer do to allow the e-mail to go through?
Pioneer is sending out all of our users e-mail. The issue
is with the remote ISP refusing to accept any e-mail. Since we don’t have any
control over the remote ISP, we cannot fix anything. Your e-mail will go
through fine to any remote ISP that doesn’t use one of these filtering
services.
Does Pioneer use one of these services?
No. Pioneer does offer the Postini service, which allows
our subscribers to choose for themselves who to accept e-mail from. If the
system detects a spam attack from a remote site (Or hacking activity), it will
dent that site access to us for a period of 1 hour. This process will continue
as long as the remote site is attacking us, as soon as they stop we will
receive their e-mail again.
How do you get put onto a list or taken off?
This varies from one service provider to another. Most will
put you on after several complaints, some as few as one complaint will
suffice. These complaints can be issues about spam, inappropriate language, or
sending viruses. To get off, policies vary greatly. Some are a time limit,
some want to know what you did to the offender, some want greater detail.
Pioneer does not release any type of subscriber information unless required by
law.
How has Pioneer been put on some lists?
Pioneer actively pursues any type of known spamming from
our system. Our acceptable use policy prohibits the sending of any type of
unsolicited mass e-mail. There have been several types of viruses that are
going around that cause a users computer to send out thousands of e-mails,
without the users knowledge. Usually this is enough to get an ISP put on the
list.
What can be done about this?
Pioneer has been in contact with most of the list
providers. Most are not too willing to work with anyone. As we see complaints
on spam, we attempt to contact any user involved to let them know. If the
problem is blatant, we must shut down the account until the computer is
disinfected. All subscribers must make sure their virus signatures are up to
date to keep them from becoming infected.
How does this effect e-mail service in general?
This actually does pose to change e-mail. With a lot of
lists and many ISP’s, you can never be sure where your e-mail will go to. You
may be on one list, getting off another, and not know you are on yet another.
E-mail has succeeded because it is global, but this tends to hurt the
reliability greatly.
Does Pioneer condone spam?
Absolutely not. Spam is one of the greatest issues
on the Internet. Users who are knowingly sending out spam, will lose their
privileges with Pioneer Internet. Although spam is an issue, removing an
entire domain seems a little extreme. None of the users from the removed
domain can send to any of the users at the receiving domain.
To help identify any spammer, Pioneer will start
transitioning to verified mail sending. This involves reconfiguring our mail
servers to require a username and password before sending e-mail. Most
software has this feature built in. If all ISP’s would require identities
before sending e-mail, the spam problem could be shut down quickly. Pioneer
will send out notification before implementing this on all users. |
