Notes regarding Spam Filtering Services

Many times Pioneer Internet is contacted regarding a remote ISP not accepting e-mail from pld.com. Usually this is the result of the remote ISP subscribing to a spam filtering service, thus the remote ISP will only accept e-mail that this service allows. Unfortunately, Pioneer Internet cannot control the actions of these services, thus we cannot remove ourselves from this list. The more reputable spam filters automatically add and remove locations based upon the amount of traffic received. The bad news is that many of the lower cost filters are not as proactive and require manual interaction.

Since Pioneer Internet is not the subscriber to these services, we are unable to resolve these issues. Pioneer Internet is successfully sending the e-mail, however the remote site is refusing to accept it. The recipient will need to contact their ISP and request that they start accepting e-mail from pld.com again. There are literally hundreds of these spam filtering services, each with different policies. Some of them request information (customer name, addresses, IP Numbers) that Pioneer Internet will not release without a subpoena. It is important for customers of the remote ISP to understand that it is their ISP that is determining who they can get e-mail from.

Although Pioneer Internet maintains many mail servers, they appear as only one server to the outside world. This is a more efficient (and faster) way of handling your e-mail, but it does have one drawback. If one user contracts a virus and sends thousands of e-mails, this can (and does) place our mail servers on these lists. We proactively monitor the amount of outgoing traffic each pld.com customer sends. If this amount appears excessive, we disallow that user from sending any additional e-mail until we can contact them. This procedure ensures that we know what is leaving our servers and keeps our mail servers off the reputable lists.

We understand that the blocking of e-mail is a sensitive issue and can cause considerable concern, both to our customers and the remote ISP’s customer who cannot receive e-mail. Pioneer Internet utilizes the services of Postini, which automatically updates any blacklists every 15 minutes. Thus if a remote site is sending spam, we will block them temporarily, but check again in 15 minutes. Once the threat has stopped, e-mail from the remote ISP is allowed into our system. This practice allows Pioneer Internet customers to receive e-mail from all other ISP’s, while still preventing a large percentage of spam. Only well documented spamming sites are blocked for a longer period of time.