[Toreador]

As regards whether we can trust NTL to filter spam - Microsoft can do it, so anyone can do it! Remember the days when hotmail accounts were an invitation to receive spam? I stopped using my account for real email as for every proper email I was receiving several huindred spams. But these days I get maybe 1 spam email every couple of months.

And as regards things like SpamPal - yes, they're all very well but you still have to download the messages to your server, and things like virus-containing mails are about 150K each, that's a lot of bandwidth. MailWasher is better as you get to delete it direct from the server, but this is slow if you leave your messages on the server so you can get at them via webmail.

Whatever NTL do they are going to lose customers. They just need to decide whether they'd prefer to lose them via inaction, or by doing something. I suspect that more people will be lost be allowing spam through than those who would go elsewhere because they prefer to deal with spam themselves.

But I have this theory that NTL want to lose as many email customers as possible, so they might stand a chance of providing a better service without spending any more money...