Tiscali e-mail woes continue

For Tiscali's 1.8 million UK subscribers, this has been an aggravating week. A week ago, customers started complaining that their e-mails weren't being received or were being delayed by days. The culprit? Spammers.

A number of spammers have set up shop with Tiscali e-mail accounts in recent days and began carpet-bombing netizens with too-good-to-be-true offers. Noticing the deluge, rival ISPs went into action and began blocking all Tiscali UK e-mails, leaving millions of Britons in a communications blackhole.

On Wednesday, Tiscali said it could take up to ten days to resolve the problem by adding new filters and notifying, one by one, each ISP to stop blocking Tiscali UK e-mails. The company said that not every customer was affected, but the damage seems to be fairly widespread. I heard about Tiscali's UK email woes in Italy when I went for my morning coffee at the neighbourhood bar earlier this week.

But things are improving, Tiscali says in its latest service update from Thursday night. All major ISPs are accepting Tiscali e-mail with one major exception: AOL. Tiscali hopes to sort this out some time today, the company adds.

Lackadaisical ISPs often are cited as the culprit in the daily spam deluge, but a glance at the list of  primary offenders compiled by the anti-spam fighters at Spamhaus reveals that Tiscali doesn't make the top ten.

Comments

[Janet]

Its been happening over a number of weeks. If you subscribe to Yahoogroups and Rootsweb, as I do, and you opt for "Individual Mails" which sends/returns a copy of one's own mail, its been since April 11 2007 that I stopped receiving them. Were it just Yahoo I would be inclined to blame them, but its not.
I wonder just how many Tiscali subscribers are not receiving their Yahoo copy posts and where in fact they have gone to. Couldnt this be something that Tiscali should address? You would think so, but its telling me not to follow up my problem for another 7 days because it has resolved all outstanding issues! I've been patient for 7 weeks! I wonder how many pre-existing issues there were, before the Spam attack that they are not considering?