"Yak of the Day." It's the one thing you have to look forward to when you get home (other than your lovely and/or handsome spouse, of course) after shlepping through b the bus/train/car traffic for an hour and a half. It's the perfect before dinner pick-me-upper, getting all the bad vibes out of your system with a couple of dumb jokes. After a quick read, you almost feel human again. Without it...
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Well, the folks at home better stay out of your way - because there will be no pre-dinner "Yak" today. The sender, Yak@aol.com, along with all the other e-mail being sent from the AOL servers, has been banned by your ISP!
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If you've ever missed an important e-mail message you were supposed to get, not only from an AOL client, but even a local, small mail server - like the one that hosts your favorite community e-mail list - the message may never have gotten into your e-mail box in the first place!
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But despite western ISPs' efforts in battling spam, servers in the U.S., Europe, Israel or other "civilized" places are often guilty of mass e-mailing (“civilized" meaning that they have strict rules and laws - that are enforced by the authorities - against spam being sent from local servers). Unfortunately, though, the mass sweeps against spammers conducted by ISPs sometimes affect perfectly innocent servers, and e-mail messages.
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How do ISPs (like our local Bezeqint, Netvision, Barak, etc.) decide who to ban and who to keep? All the ISPs I spoke to were a bit cagey about exactly what their methods are - possibly fearing that they would be accused of not covering all the bases, or some other technical deficiency on their part (although I tried to explain to them in my calmest, newspaper guy type voice exactly what I wanted to know and why, and especially made it clear that I would not be discussing any complaints by customers against ISPs). But, as it happens, the scoop for local ISPs, just like the ones overseas, is easily determined with a little Web legwork.
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If a host or domain gets into SPEWS' sights as a potential spammer, the suspected offender's ISP will be contacted for a resolution of the problem, If it gets fixed - great! But if not, suspects find themselves on the banned list, which will then get picked up by other ISPs. Since most users of an ISP received a dynamic IP address owned by the ISP itself, and since that is the number that will be listed in the spam directory, it's the ISP, not the user/domain, that bears the brunt of blame, at least among other ISPs worldwide.
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A good ISP, in fact, will do an analysis of its own user logs before being contacted by an international spam reporting service, in a search for unusual mail activity - much like a good credit card company will contact users if they notice unusual activity on a customer's credit card. From what I have gathered from local sponsors of both domains and e-mail lists that have been banned at one time or another by a major local ISP, it seems that the abuse departments of the service providers are very proactive in cutting off suspected spammers - but they usually do not contact the hosts that are affected, who only hear about the problem secondhand when users in their domain or mailing list complain (I couldn't get any information about the specific policies regarding who gets contacted when from the ISPs, either; lots of caginess on that front, too).
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