Spam fighters blame Tiscali for e-mail outage

Spam fighters are laying the blame for the widespread blocking of Tiscali's outgoing e-mail last week squarely at the feet of the "totally unresponsive" ISP. Tiscali had repeatedly ignored warnings from spam fighters that its networks had become overrun by spammers, The Spamhaus Project says in a statement issued at the weekend.

For much of last week, Tiscali's million-plus customers were, without warning, unable to e-mail friends and business contacts as rival ISPs began blocking all incoming Tiscali e-mail. The culprit was spammers setting up shop with Tiscali e-mail accounts by the the thousands, and spamming netizens by the tens of millions. As of Friday night, Tiscali says the problem appears to be fixed and that it will send out an e-mail shortly when the service is 100 per cent back to normal.

Spamhaus suggests the outage could have easily been avoided had Tiscali heeded one of the many warnings that spammers had infiltrated its networks, setting up zombie proxies to send a deluge of spam to the masses. Spamhaus estimates that there are 19,000 such zombie spammers on the Tiscali network, putting the ISP at the top of the league tables. "Most large commercial broadband networks worldwide are infested with zombies, but less by comparison with Tiscali," Spamhaus says in a statement. "In the UK, BT, many times the size of Tiscali, has 18,000 zombies currently and VirginMedia 10,000 – but either of those could do those networks a lot of damage if the spammers chose to activate them to take part in a single attack."

Spamhaus – which runs a popular block list of known spammers, an action that can trigger other ISPs to then block any communication coming from that source – says it did not put Tiscali on its list, thus triggering the outage. Still, Spamhaus, reckons that Tiscali brought the problem on itself. "What has made this case so much more difficult is that Tiscali corporate management has in the past been almost totally unresponsive to other networks' complaints, and that attitude does lead to blocks being put in place more quickly by those networks that have tried to contact them," Spamhaus says.

Meanwhile, impacted customers could find it difficult trying to get their money back following the downed service. "They have a contract with us and they are obliged to pay us," a Tiscali spokeswoman told The Register.

Comments

[Robin]

In a world where the web is become a more and more important way to communicate it is vital
I think with anything a lot of people or companies have good intentions at heart, thus try to offer you things with good intentions but unfortunately we are becoming more and more of a slave to technology, eg can't work with it and can't go on holiday with out it.

I however would always want to be open and clear in my intentions because I think what you give out in this world someday you will get back and even more of what you put out. As the old phrase goes "live by the sword die by the sword" I think it is important to offer things or submit things with good intentions knowing that your offering things on the net or in life that will actually contribute to the growth of society or the individual rather than spam and take away from them.