ISP's Filtering Your Email - Radarhill.com -- Complete Web Development Solutions, Victoria, BC, Canada

ISP's Filtering Your Email

In an effort to curb spam through their services the major ISP's (Internet Service Providers) have begun filtering email. As an unfortunate side effect some legitimate messages are being refused. The infamous 'false positive'.

The same can happen if 'suspect' emails are scanned by their virus scanners as potentially being infected. "But," you say, "my computer scans outbound email for viruses, why would the ISP's think my email has a virus?" There could be several reasons: their virus definitions are more 'paranoid', they are using a different process for scanning than yourself, or your ISP (example: shaw.ca, telus.net, etc.) have not made it to their approved list (White List) - [I'll comment further on White Lists later].

It is also common practise to refuse inbound email that contains non-text content (i.e. HTML, pictures, attachments).

All of this is in an attempt to slow down spam, primarily; the secondary objective is to slow down viruses (can you believe it!?!). The reason I use the words 'slow down' is that spam will likely never go away. Some experts also point to recent legislation in Canada and the US that legitimizes spam (by making laws to govern something, spam in this case, do you not acknowledge and thereby, legitimize it?).

Regardless, all this slows down a medium, electronic mail (email), of communalisation that was originally built to overcome a nuclear holocaust. Leave it to marketing to mess up the message!

['White Lists' are the registry of legitimate email addresses that can send email - regardless of their content - through the ISP.]

Articles of Interest:

Filter promises spam feast without e-mail famine:
news.com.com/2100-1032-5153907.html

Bill Gates: news.com.com/2100-1032-5151925.html

Spoofing: news.com.com/2100-1032-5145065.html

Filtering: news.com.com/2100-1024-5140556.html

AOL HTML: news.com.com/2100-1024-5107785.html

Net Heavyweights unite: news.com.com/2100-1025-998511.html?tag=nl