[Fot] Trouble with receiving FOT mails

[Tony Drews]

I end up blocked every once in a while.  What happens is that someone 
else using your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is sending out 
unsolicited e-mails (spam).  So, one of the "blacklist" agencies puts 
the outgoing address (IP address) of these messages on a list of 
spammers.  The companies that subscribe to the blacklist agency then 
rejects your e-mails.  In order to get this fixed, the ISP needs to 
terminate the spammers account and contact the blacklist agency to 
get their IP address(es) removed from the blocked list.  I have had 
to do this before for a company that hosted their own e-mail account, 
and it's no fun to work with the blacklist agencies.

In my case, the ISP that hosts my domain, website and e-mail is 
pretty good about killing the bad guys' account and getting me back 
in service.  It usually takes a couple of days.

This doesn't affect FOT e-mails getting to me, or my ability to send 
to FOT, but it DOES affect my ability to reply privately.  In an 
effort to keep off the blacklist, my ISP limits me to 10 addresses on 
any outgoing mail.  That's bitten me before too on a "reply to all".

I have no good suggestions to the German ISP's blocking / rejection 
of e-mail from the FOT list.  It would be nice of them to offer an 
explanation of what's wrong with the e-mail message headers and what 
they need to see in those headers in order to NOT block the 
messages.  It's possible that Mark can tweak something to make that 
change happen.

I suspect that an ISP based in Germany is less interested in 
contacting some agency in the USA that has put them on the "bad guys" 
list than my US-based ISP is.

One possible solution is to get yet ANOTHER e-mail address from 
someone like google or yahoo.  They are likely to keep things 
moving.  Google e-mail can be retrieved by normal e-mail clients.

I've read statistics that over 90% of the e-mail sent in the world is 
unsolicited "spam" e-mail (may be as much as 97%).  The volume has 
roughly doubled over the last year.  My personal account has received 
199 of them so far today, and I'll probably get 50 more before 
midnight.  There's no perfect solution on how to block these, so 
different ISP's use different strategies to fight this scourge.  This 
is a HUGE problem and threatens the use of e-mail in general.  I've 
missed key business correspondence because the ISP that hosts my 
office's e-mail has flagged inter-office communications and 
communications from vendors and clients as spam.

Internet e-mail needs a redesign that solves this problem.

- Tony

At 11:22 AM 10/16/2007, you wrote:
>I have COX and I think Kas does too and my FOT messages are not blocked, I
>am sure that Kas' aren't either.
>
>Joe C.
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Marx Christian tr4-racing" <chris at tr4-racing.de>
>To: <fot at autox.team.net>
>Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 8:11 AM
>Subject: Re: [Fot] Trouble with receiving FOT mails
>
>
> > Especialy the providers
> >
> > Comcast.net
> > juno.com
> > cox.net
> > bellsouth.net
> >
> > and some others block my mails out
> >
> > Chris