May 30, 2005 - TBayTel makes it on SpamCop's Blacklist
Last week I received a few calls from some of my customers complaining that their email wasn't going through. On further inspection the bounced emails were saying that TBayTel was on SpamCop's Real-Time Blacklist (RBL). A Black List is a publically available list of I.P. addresses that are known to have sent spam. Many mail servers use this list to block spam. This method can work extremely effectively but can also block legitimate email - especially in the case where an ISP such as TBayTel gets put on this list. This is not rare either, Shaw Cable was on this for a small duration last year too. TBayTel said that they had fixed this and that they were going to be off of this list within 24 hours.

Why did TBayTel get put on this list you may ask? The answer comes back to spyware and viruses. Spammers take control of your computer and send out masses of spam.

At TBayIT we use a Spam Filtering procedure but not Black Lists - just because of the above issues. We also recommend that all our clients who use TBayTel for Internet Access use our mail servers as their SMTP server to prevent any blocked emails during this time.

More Information:
• SpamCop.net
• SPEWS.org