I'm not talking about FIFA's decision to allow Thierry Henrys goal stand and eliminate us from the world cup, or even our Ladies Bobsleigh team under threat of expulsion from the Winter Olympics for whatever reason. Nor am I referring to Roddy Doyle’s dialogue in the Commitments referring to us Irish as, well 'Outsiders'!!
Modern day communication in our country is under threat. As a nation we send hundreds of thousands of emails every day. Some hoping to generate business for our ailing economy, some to catch up with distant relatives or long lost friends, anyway you catch my drift..... But are these intended recipients actually receiving our emails as we would expect? Maybe not!
Regular email is considered HAM and unsolicited email SPAM, so let’s get that out of the way and move on! Thankfully procedures are put in place on the internet and within companies to try and differentiate between Spam and Ham so we are saved the task of siphoning through our inboxes for mail we want to read. Super! However, what if the person you are trying to send an email to has a system in place that thinks your Ham is Spam? That couldn’t happen surely, you're not selling Viagra, Cialis, and Rolexes etc. Well mail systems need to be more clever than that because if they weren’t, how would Pfizer ever send an email to anyone? They're a pretty big company!!
Many anti-spam products use a technique known as blacklisting. I won’t bore you with the exact details but basically if you're name or number (IP address) is on a black list, there is a good chance your mail won’t be received by the intended recipient.
Some recipient’s mail servers check your name and IP address against a number of blacklist servers and if you appear on one of them, your mail gets sent off into cyber space never to be seen again!
I don’t send spam emails, how can I be blacklisted?
Well, up until recently, the most common way to be blacklisted was for your computer to become infected by a mass mailing worm (virus) which acts as a spammer on your computer. If you didn’t stop it quickly enough, you would eventually end up on a blacklist.
That is up until recently (I eventually get to the point)!! When I say recently I mean in the last six months, Irelands leading ISPs have now found themselves listed on Blacklist servers and the moderators of these servers are refusing to take them off! Germany based UCE are refusing to remove blocks of Eircom’s IP addresses from their blacklists. Barracuda, Spam Cop and Abuse At are also blacklisting Eircom’s mail servers but will accept requests by individuals to remove domain names and IP addresses. And it doesn't just stop at Eircom; O2, Clearwire, Vodafone/BT are all there too!! You can check it out for yourself at www.mxtoolbox.com where you can type in your domain name (yourcompany.com) or IP address and see where you are listed.
This is a result of poorly managed networks; trying to charge people for anti spam systems when they should have been stopping it themselves. Allowing their mail servers relay mails at will just to make selling their products that bit easier. Not having the brains to differentiate home users from business users (they know how to differentiate charging them!!).
It doesn’t look like this will be resolved soon though they have at least admitted to the problem which is a big step in the right direction.....
Maybe we should revert to fax or Skype and start talking again!!!
