EIRCOM IS to introduce new measures stopping spam e-mail from being distributed on its network, to avoid blacklisting by anti-spam groups which has prevented some customers from sending genuine e-mail.
Eircom and several other Irish internet service providers, including UPC, BT Ireland, Vodafone, O2, and Clearwire were recently blacklisted by the German anti-spam organisation UCE-Protect Network.
Several anti-spam providers operate worldwide blacklists, including Spamhaus, Barracuda, Spam Cop and Abuse At. Most of them only block a particular computer’s IP address if it has been identified as sending spam. Others such as UCE-Protect block entire ranges of IP addresses belonging to the same ISP, which can lead to some of that provider’s customers having legitimate e-mails blocked.
One such company is the Dublin public relations firm MKC Communications, an Eircom customer, which was unable to send e-mail for up to three weeks last summer.
The company suffered further e-mail outages in December and last month. Its business was seriously disrupted, said MKC managing director Tim Kinsella. “The first time it happened, I would say 75 per cent of all e-mails in our company were affected,” he said.
The problem typically originates with poorly secured home computers which become infected with malicious software and are used by spammers as relays for sending large volumes of junk e-mail, said Ken O’Driscoll, technical director with IE Internet, a specialist e-mail service provider.
“The problem is, no distinction is made between outgoing e-mail servers that are given to business customers and the general IP addresses given to broadband customers,” said Mr O’Driscoll.
The Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland says e-mail blacklisting is an ongoing industry-wide problem. Spammers constantly change their tactics and spam-detection companies are forced to keep up by taking harsh measures, according to the association’s general manager Paul Durrant.
“Some anti-spam companies have maybe sometimes not been as granular as we would have wished.”
Declan Ivory, general manager of Eircom Net, said the company was taking steps to be removed from UCE-Protect’s blacklist.
“The number of IP addresses affected is a very small fraction of 1 per cent, but it’s enough to put them on UCE-Protect,” he said. “Ninety-five per cent of customer e-mails are getting through.”
Mr Ivory said the company regularly monitored up to 20 anti-spam blacklists worldwide. “We’re not currently on any other blacklist and we keep an eye on that.”
Eircom is also implementing technical processes to prevent spam from spreading and avoid becoming blacklisted in the first place. “Effectively, we’re going to identify spam more clearly at source and take it out of our system before it appears in the wider network,” said Mr Ivory.
This service will be launched by the end of March.
Vodafone is to take similar action, following reports that some customers were prevented from sending e-mails to certain addresses. Kevin Treacy from New Ross in Wexford said he had been unable to send e-mail to Hotmail accounts from his Vodafone address for the past six months.
When contacted, Vodafone said there were no reported issues with messages sent to other e-mail accounts. The company said it had implemented a partial fix, preventing any incoming viruses and spam, and it expects a further fix to be in place in the coming weeks.
Mr Durrant advised broadband users to keep their security software up to date, to avoid becoming infected and in turn reduce the likelihood of having their ISP blacklisted.
