Verizon disallowed relaying from foreign (non-Verizon) domains? But that's simply good sense; most ISPs do this nowadays. And the ones that don't are often involuntarily responsible for huge amounts of SPAM and wind up on email blacklists such as ORBS.

If you're saying that they disallow a foreign From: address for mail sent from within their network, that's probably a good idea, too; most spamming trojans attempt to disguise themselves by spoofing that.

Use the Reply-to: address field if you want replies sent to an alternate domain.

(oops-deleted)

I get huge amounts of spam daily ... just like most of you. However, I want to filter that myself and by hand. None of the well intentioned spam filters I have seen are good enough to trust.

Like some others who use FT, I do business in many different places. It is vital that I get email from people I don't know who learn of my services through my web site or by word of mouth. I would find it intolerable for an ISP to act like my mother to filter out email fromwhole regions of the world.

The funniest, most frustrating thing is the attitude expressed by the CS person who wanted to know why anyone would be interested in communicating with someone outside of the USA, and that anyone who does should know the addresses of all such folks in advance!

Best wishes,

Teacher49

I am quite sure that Verizon doesn't block any country since I receive emails from all over the world, including Korea which sends more spam than any country I know of. However I stopped receiving Korean spam a while back. I assume that Verizon or some other ISP has been successful in blocking them.

It's very dicey to claim one is a Common Carrier when one is selectively deciding which traffic to allow/forbid.

Why is that? Verizon the phone company also will not accept incoming calls from illegitimate phone companies. And they are certainly a Common Carrier. There is no obligation to accept junk.

That said, there is no easy answer for ISP's dealing with spam. I bet less than 1% of Verizons million plus email users know how to set a spam filter. So they are trying to help their customers. I don't know if what they have done is right or not, but I do know that I am happy with my Verizon email service. Having an email account for over 4 years should mean that I get loaded with spam. However only a few per day make it into my account. And I have never heard from anyone saying they couldn't send me mail.

Hey Teacher49 !

Take a look at mailwasher Pro 4.0 by firetrust, I like to review mail by hand but don't like it downloaded. You can have blacklists and create your own blacklists over time, it can auto delete or delete after you've reviewed all the headers. You can reply without having the emails come into your email program also. Due to poor connections I have yahoo / aol / and foreign email addresses and mailwash can review them all. I also use Firefox on some machines but am comfortable with mailwasher on my laptop.

Whenever there appears to be an attack of spam from an ISP then companies will disallow email from that ISP from coming over again. It will take the ISP contacting the other one to say Hey, let our emails through. From my area my local ISP gets blacklisted all the time from all over the world. But it does sound like this from verizon is kind of wrong. What's the use of having email if they won't allow emails to come in from overseas automatically.

Surely you're not making the analogy that all email sent from outside the US is illegitimate, are you? There's an implicit acceptance of traffic one deems OK, whch clouds one's defense as a Common Carrier if said acceptable traffic contains questionable data.

Of course not. Read my posts where I said I (as a verizon.net customer) get plenty of email from overseas and I tested verizon.net from my own overseas ISP account. Verizon is NOT blocking overseas emails. If anything, they are blocking email from ISP's that Verizon believes does not practice good spam control or ISP's that they do not believe are legitimate players. That is my judgement based on experience anyways. Verizon the phone company along with just about every other phone company out there practice the same general control on their network interconnections.

Thanks for the tip. I have downloaded Mailwasher, and will give it a try over time to see if it lowers my spam count. My wife is the one who really needs it. Poor dear somehow got on the "bad list" and is getting 3-4 hundred spam a day. Her email address is known to our students and advertised throughout the US and Europe, so we will try to fix it before giving it up.

Best wishes,

Teacher49

This was a couple of years ago, before SPAM got completely out of hand. It essentially made working from home impossible. You had to either tunnel your SMTP traffic to the office (easy for me but not for everyone) or use an obviously non-work email address as the From: address. Of course you could also buy higher-priced business services from Verizon that would allow you to do what you wanted. The policy had everything to do with revenue enhancement and nothing to do with network protection.

Terms of Service
 

What usually happens is that when you sign up you agree to the TOS. The TOS will include some legal mumbo-jumbo that says you also agree to any future change in the TOS. In other words, you unilaterally agree to anything except maybe your first-born child (second-born is usually OK, though).

One of the PC magazines recommended the anti spam system at Couldmark.com, the cloudmark safety bar last month. I'm in day 28 of a thirty day free trial, its' the first system that I've tried that I'll actually pay to use once the free trial is up. Doesn't catch all of it, but it does something no other system I've tried has done, every thing it catches (and it's catching like 85 to 90% of it now) is spam, it hasn't caught a single legitimate e-mail after it's first two or three days of training.

SBC, my ISP, one day decided that anything coming from Namesecure, a domain registrar, including any mail forwarded by them, was spam. I fought with them for weeks, Namesecure fought with them for weeks, and they refused to allow any of the mail through. The issue, for me, was that's where cordelli.com is located, so any mails sent to cordelli.com were sent to my sbc box from namesecure. They wouldn't back down, because some people were using namesecure to send spam.

My alternative was to get another mailbox from there. Any ISP will make a decision as they see fit, without warning, blocking something because somebody feels it's for the "good" of everybody. SCB could just as easily have blocked only the offending people, but they were way too lazy to do that, they just shut it all down.

Everybody needs to have a backup plan in place, because sooner or later, it will happen to you too, your ISP will just feel someplace that sends you mail all the time is not somebody they want to let through anymore.

Well, play with it, Mailwasher you teach, you mark the emails as blacklist or friend, it can learn itself but I was kind of like you and like to review email headers as I just am not sure due to my work. So you can review the headers and some of the email but it won't download off the server, then mark the email as blacklist so it will always be blacklisted or friend (so it is always allowed through). You can then process the mail so all blacklisted emails are deleted automatically or upon command (I use by command usually but they can do it automatically). The blacklisted emails can be bounced back to the sender so your sending the email back to them as invalid email address and hopefully they'll take you off their email hit list after some attempts. Generally it works for me. I think I've built up a list of over 10,000 blacklisted email addresses.

I hope it works for you or if it doesn't I hope you find something that does.

I'm not sure how this works in the package you are using, but lots of spam and virus laden mail I've seen lately has the return email address of innocent people. Thus, blacklisting all addresses that show up in the From: line might not be such a good idea...