Angelfire, Arabia.com, and a host of other server companies are often targeted by anti-spam activists in the attempt to stanch the flow of unwanted pornography, cheap diplomas, and pyramid schemes. Not to mention any piece of e-mail sent from Nigeria. But in the noble effort to stop spammers, many innocent server subscribers are finding their e-mails bounced back or automatically classified as Junk.rnrn
E-mail blacklists are a more militant tool in the arsenal of anti-spam warriors but, just like the "XXX" block a company might place on web surfing, preventing employees from visiting not only AVN.com but also Superbowl or other roman numeral-friendly sites, the blacklists might bounce the personal e-mails of non-spammers.rnrn
Mail-abuse.com is a California-based not-for-profit whose mission is "to defend the Internet's e-mail system from abuse by spammers." Exhorting ISPs to adopt strong anti-spam policies, it has been sued several times by firms calling its practices restrictive to free trade. Maintaining a list of IP addresses from which spams have been sent, Mail-abuse.com and other organizations draw fire for punishing many for the dirty deeds of a few.rnrn
But with the current spam rate estimated at 30% and projections of 51% spam saturation by the end of this year, services like those provided by Spews.org aim to err on the side of filtering out bad apples en masse.rnrn
The solution for the innocent victim of mass filtering seems to be to sign up with an established ISP with its own stringent regulations about outgoing spam.
