Originally Posted by pem

My Mum sent be an online birthday message (from Yahoo) on my birthday - my spam assassin (which is generally very good) classed it as spam.

I would have been very annoyed if NTL had took it upon themselves to delete this.

Originally Posted by Sociable

I take your point MikeyB but this is not what we are suggesting here.

Suppose "Snail Mail" became free for all users sending out mail and as a result the commercial companies and others all started flooding the network with junk mail.

The inevitable result would be that all mail would get bogged down by the sheer weight of the junk causing delays and increasing costs to the point the whole system would break down.

Would your solution in this case be to want the postman to knock on your door and say, "ok we have split the mail in to two piles, one pile appears to be junk the other appears to be OK sorry it is two days late but we have too much mail to handle now".

Or would you rather someone at the local sorting office kept track of all the obvious junk and delivered it straight back to the person that sent it when that sender is know to be on a list of abusers of the system and is repeating previous misuse of the system.

This second option would reduce the impact of the junk mail freeing up the system to improve and maintain efficient delivery of the legitamate mail.

Yes the odd letter might get treated inappropriately but the sender would be made aware of this by its return to them. They can then make arrangements to have themselves eliminated from any list of automatically rejected mail by confirming it is legitamate.

OK maybe the example is a little far fetched but come to think of it if this could be applied to the Royal Mail too I could eventually get off the Readers Digest mailing list. :)

Originally Posted by stuartbe

Thanks for the rep point Sociable - Do I take it that you are letting me of buying you the beer ? :)

Originally Posted by Enterian

I voted leave it alone, I would tolerate it being marked as spam.

But I will not tolerate NTL taking it upon themselves not to deliver certain items of my email. If NTL adopt (or have adopted) this policy then they must provide an opt-out, such as Demon have done.

Whilst not a legal expert, I would suspect that the deletion of the wrong email may well leave NTL vulnerable to consequential loss claims.

Enterian

Originally Posted by s1lv3r

A well established and maintained blacklist would not filter out the legitimate emails described in previous posts.

Originally Posted by threadbare

not really as they provide a residential service. I am sure ntl's responce would be - If email is that important then a business service would be more appropriate

Originally Posted by s1lv3r

There seem to be some mis-conceptions about how a server side anti-spam solution may work..

The blacklist, is a list of either domains or IP addresses that are KNOWN to be originators of spam, as in they've had a certain number of complaints and had them followed up.
A blacklist should never block an entire domain if there are legitimate accounts operating from it.
Nor should open relays be blocked, because an appropriate spam reporting system should highlight a problem like that and enable the relavant admins to rectify problems with their setup.

A well established and maintained blacklist would not filter out the legitimate emails described in previous posts.

What we need to get out of our heads is the notion that an ISP would operate some kind of active filter based on rules.. that would be a total waste of their time.. and more to the point it would use up much more processing time, which again.. no sensible ISP would want.

Originally Posted by Enterian

I wonder if the Royal Mail would get away with that response? Why is a residential service any less important than a business one? How many people on a 'residential' service exchange emails with businesses?

Are you saying than any person on NTL:Home who orders things on the internet should really have a business email account?

Originally Posted by threadbare

well i maybe get 2 spam messages a day - i used to get 15 - 20 - so they are doing something right

I have not had any emails go missing as I dont get personal messages from spam merchants