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Originally Posted by luv-snail
This is a bit of a sensitive issue with a lot of people. The majority of inexperienced users would probably welcome spam and/or virus filtering on their email, but almost all advanced users are strongly opposed to any kind of mail filtering done by the ISP. The job of the ISP's mail servers is to accept the customers' mail and make it available to them, without unnecessarily tampering with it. Some users may *want* to receive spam emails or viruses, for whatever reason, and it is not the place of the ISP to say that they cannot. Also, no mail filtering software is 100% accurate, and you can guarantee that some legitimate email would be filtered out by the system.
Installing spam and virus protection is the responsibility of the user, and the most the ISP can do is educate the user about the need to do so. I run my own mail server, so I don't rely on ntl's mail servers for my main email, but if I did I would have to seriously consider switching ISP if they started filtering email.
That's the way I see it, anyway.  |
Sorry Luv-Snail, it is the responsibility of email serving Internet service providers to ensure they provide a reliable and stable email platform to all subscribers. If you could see the amount of junk email literally targeted at mail servers, and the cost in £M's it takes to process such material, you'd have a different view.
If a user's ISP is filtering spam, and do not offer any user intervention to control such, then users should consider a different email service if they believe that they are being dictated too by their service providers. The fact that BT, Tiscali, AOL, Freeserve and now ntl offer anti spam filtering is evidence that spam is a serious issue. I suspect that most service providers will have some kind of spam filtering service, and in most cases will allow user control at some stage.
ntl may have been slow in the uptake, but they have no choice, better to loose a tiny minority of users to save hundreds and thousands of customers.
ntl are now spam filtering email, and blocking inbound virus infected attachments. Phase two this year will see an increase in spam filtering with the use of a popular third party filtering service, which will have some user control.
You make a valid point though, users should still use their own spam filtering and virus protection, and I'm sure that ntl and other services providers will continue to educate their customers accordingly.
Yes, no anti spam measure is 100% effective, but that should not be a reason to allow spammers through your network. Cut off their source of revenue, and they will go else where. The fact of the matter is that they will limit their attacks to networks that allow spam through., and that could spell disaster to a small network, possibly the one you switch too if you feel ntl are not doing the right thing?