Why Do ISPs and E-mail Carriers Use Spam Filtering?

E-mail Strategies by Mike Barnett

RISMEDIA, Oct. 22, 2008-I have written in the past about spam and filtering. One question we seem to have left unanswered is, why do ISPs and e-mail carriers use filtering programs?

At InternetCrusade, we work (and communicate) with as many of the different ISPs as possible. As mentioned, each one of the ISPs temporarily blacklists different e-mail servers at one time or another for forwarding spam to them. Every once in a while this can occur to IC as well.

When this happens, we ask for the specific reasons and proof as to why our e-mail severs have been blacklisted, and they respond by providing the mail on which they have based their case.

Inevitably, the e-mail in question is spam that we have forwarded. None of the above mentioned ISPs are interested in the fact that we are not the origin of the spam, just in that we handled the e-mail and didn’t stop it from being forwarded.

Creating relationships with the major ISPs does help, but still does not completely protect any carrier from this problem.

To give a typical ISP relationship example: we have been whitelisted with AOL for several years now. And, in spite of this relationship, AOL still has a zero-tolerance policy for spam forwarding. Every day, AOL sends us several notifications of e-mail that we have forwarded to AOL addresses that violate their Terms of Service. Nearly all of the notifications regarding spam are for e-mail that we have forwarded. We are then bound by our agreement with them to cease the forwarding of the e-mail in question.

Obviously, when our e-mail servers are blacklisted (even temporarily), the entire InternetCrusade e-mail community is affected. We want to provide as many communication avenues as possible for our customers, and continue to work toward solutions that work for them. In the meantime, however, we must protect the reliability of our e-mail service, and must be prudent in keeping off of blacklists for the good of all members.

To accommodate the changes in the forwarding process, IC has made the decision to not forward e-mail that we feel is spam.

Please note: InternetCrusade is not blacklisted by third-party Real-time Blacklists (RBLs), such as the Open Relay Database (www.ordb.org) or Spamhaus (www.spamhaus.org). The ORDB and Spamhaus are services that actively monitor and block open relay and exploited e-mail servers. Our e-mail servers are secure, closed relay servers.

Mike Barnett is CTO/VP of Technology for InternetCrusade’s RealTown.com.

For more information, please visit www.realtown.com or e-mail Mike@MikeBarnett.com.