Total frustration

[CosmicBob]

He's secretly conspiring to send you a check and doesn't want to communicate with you until you recieve his check.

 

He's probably a communist too.

[comicwiz]

There are organizations out there who track and publish "Black Lists" of these naughty boxes and publish that info for ISPs to use in an effort to filter spam which sometimes causes problems for legit users as you've discovered

 

Yep, Dave's got it right. Your ISP has been Blacklisted , and regardless of what you do, its not a situation that can get resolved quickly or easily.

 

My suggestion is to set-up a free email service like hotmail or yahoo, and send him an email this way.

 

The biggest knock agains the spamming bureau is that they were designed as a watchdog outfit to monitor and prevent spam abuse. The blacklist is comprised of a list of spam abusers, and their isp's. Once an email address has been flagged, those records are available publicly until the matter is resolved by the ISP. So for example, if you somehow ended-up on a persons mailing list, and recieve an email, lets say from a person like Reynold Jay, and you email him back to have you removed from his list, then its not really grounds for abuse unless Reynold Jay disobeys your request and persists to send you emails (I'm not picking on Reynold Jay, but he's the only one I could think of that has some relevance to comics and this discussion).

 

If the spam abuse continues, and you decide to blacklist the person, then you would do it through the spamming bureau. But here's the problem. The spamming bureau does very little to actually investigate the legitimacy and authenticity of each claim for spam abuse. In most cases, they side with the complainer. This is a problem because the victim deosn't even know about it until an irate customer calls them by phone and says "hey, what's wrong with your email?" By that time, the damage has already been done.

 

Now, hotmail is easily the largest abuser of spam. Not only on the grounds that its members use hotmail accounts to send broadcast emails globally, but hotmail has been known to sell its members information as mailing lists to companies all across the world. Why is it that hotmail has never been blacklisted?

 

Joanna, I would contact your ISP and explain to them that your customer is not able to recieve emails from you because you have been blocked from their servers (blacklisted). Provide the domain of your customer (ie. customer@domainname.com), and explain that you would like to your ISP's name removed from the spamming bureau's blacklist. Dig into them, because a lot of time they scuttle this issue because its a lot of work for them to track down which of their customer is the abuser. Its not entirely fair to say all ISP's are dodgers, and in fact, they have also been known to be quite vigilant against this problem, and in most cases, they don't even know this is happening unless someone brings it to their attention.

 

Getting someone on a blacklist is easy. Removing them is far more difficult. My issue with the whole blacklist thing is that there are people who actually get a kick out of submitting false claims, and create problems for the sake @#$# with people's time and reputation. There should be a way for the spamming bureau to make it a little more difficult, or to properly investigate each spam abuse claims -- at the very least, have a way for the wrongly blacklisted to remove themselves in a more rapid manner through the bureau's web site.

 

Good luck.

[Shield]

What's an open relay?

 

An open relay is a mail server that accepts and forwards email without authenticating the sender or verifying they are sourcing from the domain the mail server is serving.

 

So Joe Blow can write any address in the from field. A message from GWBush@whitehouse.gov for example is more likely to be read than JoeBlow@spammer.com. The open relay email server happily forwards the message or millions of them in which case it's a spammers delight.

 

There are organizations out there who track and publish "Black Lists" of these naughty boxes and publish that info for ISPs to use in an effort to filter spam which sometimes causes problems for legit users as you've discovered

 

dave h

 

Thanks Dave H for saving me the time to type all of this.

 

What he said.

[Joanna]

Thank you to everyone on this thread. My mac.com email got through and my customer paid via paypal this morning. At least I now know that I have an alternative if this sort of thing happens again.

 

My sincerest thanks to all of you for offering to help, and for explaining some of the reasons behind the situation.

 

 

== Joanna