Tiscali Email Service Suffers From Spammers

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Spammers have knocked out the e-mail service for many of the customers of internet service provider (ISP) Tiscali, the firm has said.

Users e-mails have not been delivered to their intended recipients as other ISPs block e-mail traffic from Tiscali.

Tiscali has not said how many of its 1.8m UK customers are affected by the outage which started eight days ago.

It said engineers were "taking urgent action" to block spammers using its e-mail service to send messages.

A statement on the Tiscali website read: "We have been targeted by spammers using our service, which in turn has meant other ISPs have taken measures to block mail sent by Tiscali. This is not affecting all delivery addresses. Some mail continues to be delivered as normal."

This is why the whole SPEWS subnet blocking argument is totally wrong imho, it should email address or singular IP that is blocked rather then hold class c subnets.

Its an absolute pain in the arse.

BBC News Report

Email addresses are easy to get round. I've got this program which can send an email to mass recipients and enter any senders address I want and it will seem to come from that email address.

Singular IP address blocking is more effective, but also isn't too hard to get around.

The thing I see me arse with is I have to change my IP address on my servers every now and again cos of the dimwits who block entire subnets.

It can be a person not even in the same rack sending out spam that causes hundreds of servers owners to have to change thier IP's. It can even be someone who is just mistaken for sending out spam that causes it all.

Also its all too automated, there is no warning given to the NOC, they just ban the entire subnet without notice.

And now we are looking at maybe 3 years left for IPv4 and its largely thanks to all these spammers who are causing subnets to be blocked and thats like 255 IP's at a time. Eventually we will all have to move onto IPv6 as a result of IPv4 being wasted.