brown e-mail blocked

[prhall]

Hello -

I am hoping that there are administrators or SpamCop employees that read these postings. I am a graduate student at Brown University and am experiencing a problem with my e-mail - in the last two days, at least three servers have blocked me from sending e-mails to my colleagues, friends, and loved ones.

I know that you are in contact with Brown's computing team, but I thought perhaps a personal testimonial could encourage you to speed up the process and remedy the problem. As you are well aware, e-mail is used now in lieu of phone calls to schedule and confirm appointments as well as to communicate with family and friends around the world. This is more than an inconvenience ---

Thank you,

Polly Hall

[StevenUnderwood]

Polly:

If you post the error message you are receiving we might be able to explain a bit better why your messages are not getting though.

In general, spam has been reported as coming from the email servers you are using. The ISP's of your loved ones are protecting them by blocking servers which have recently sent spam.

When spam stops being sent by the Brown mail servers, the servers will drop off the list automatically...there is no "process" to be removed on the spamcop end.

As you are well aware, e-mail is used now in lieu of phone calls to schedule and confirm appointments as well as to communicate with family and friends around the world. This is more than an inconvenience ---

At least when people use the spamcop DNSBL as you have seen, you get notice that your message did not get through. Many systems automatically redirect messages or hold them along the path so the final recipient does not see that a message was sent and you do not know the message was not received. That is part of the architecture of email, it is NOT a guaranteed delivery system.

[DavidT]

That is part of the architecture of email, it is NOT a guaranteed delivery system.

This is increasingly so, but mostly due to spamming. It used to be that an email either went straight through to the intended recipient, or, if one of any number of error conditions were present, the sending system would be notified of the problem (preferably during the attempted delivery). Thanks to all the idiots who have bought things that were advertized in spam, email delivery is now much less reliable.

DT

[StevenUnderwood]

David, I was talking more along the times when there might be 4 or 5 hops between sending and delivery. Less than 10 years ago, all of our company email was directed through a third party email transfer system because we were not directly "on the internet". If their system went down at the wrong time (after receipt but before we picked it up), we lost email.