Tiscali coughs to spam blacklisting after a week without email
'Er...try Hotmail...for another week'
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
Updated Tiscali has admitted the reason many of its customers have been unable to send outgoing email for over a week is because it has been blacklisted as a spammer.
According to Reg contacts, Tiscali is known in the anti-spam community as slow to act against abuse of its network. In a statement, it said: "We...have been targeted by spammers using our service to send out spam, this in turn has meant other ISPs have taken measures to block mail being sent by Tiscali."
The Italian-owned ISP has still not provided a timeframe for when it will resolve the crisis. Tiscali said: "Our engineers are taking urgent action to block the spammers abusing our email service, this will progressively take effect over the next few days. We will post daily updates on the Service Status page and also within Forums until normal service is resumed."
Tiscali has apologised and advised users cut off by the blacklisting to use a free webmail service. A company representative said a meeting to discuss action was ongoing. ®
Update
Tiscali now says it will complete work at its end to rectify its spammer status this afternoon, but that the changes will take between seven and ten days to take effect, which is unlikely to appease many.
COMMENTS
erm
"You can certainly (rightfully) criticise us for our technical issues (or cock-ups if you prefer), but I think it's unfair to be bringing PlusNet into this one. We at least never tried to hide things from customers and are prepared to explain what's going on to our customer base and to anyone else that cares to listen.
Ian
PlusNet Product Team"
Bollocks!! One day my downloads from an external newshost server went from being full speed to less than 4k...... 2 weeks and many phonecalls later you're incompetant support team said "oh yeah, we downgrade you to a bronze service if you go over a couple of gig usenet use... it shouldnt effect normal internet use".... without notice and the option to leave when you did change the server I was forced to leave to the cost of £200!! Your customer service claimed I was making things up, didnt know what I was talking about, and was lying about not receiving an email detailing the change to service a few months earlier. I was so pissed off at you I made sure all my friends and family left too (obviously, I was technical enough to do that one! :o )...
The only ISP I like these days has been Be... and even they have their problems from time to time (less than many others I tried though).... but at least their support team actually know what they are talking about (at least the ones I talked to).... and unlike a few other "hey, we are the fastest (if you live 2cm from the exchange) AHEM" - they give you a guesstimate at the realistic speeds you will receive for your £24 a month when you order, so you can decide not to go for the up to 24mb for £24 bargain! ... and they were spot on with my 11mb-12mb. :)
plusnet
Out of all the ISP's I have used (pipex, bulldog, BT, Virgin) plusnet have been the most efficient, most technically competent and provide the most comprehensive service, seems a shame to tar them with the same brush as tiscalli. Just a shame BT bought them really, but let see how it pans out. Gee I still remember the six months it took me to cancel bulldog, seems like only yesterday I was ringing them 3 times a day demanding my money back, or the 12 days I went without a home phone, or the 11 incorrect bills, or the 7 months that the people who bought my house could not get broadband for, because bulldog would not disconnect it, and let them have their own supplier......
Is there a good ISP? - yes, there is
Zen Internet. Yes, £25 a month might seem pricey compared with some of the "big names", but you get what you pay for - technical support people that know what they're talking about for starters.
And I can wholeheartedly back up Tim Abel's suggestion - I've been using fastmail.fm for 3 years now, and my account has been down for a paltry 1 hour over 3 years - and they were giving status updates (including brief technical information regarding the cause of the problem) every 10-15 minutes during the outage, and after an hour failed-over to a redundant server. 99.996% uptime is pretty good over a 3 year period.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
