Netvigator under fire over spam response
The following is just a small part of a long message that was sent to Tech Talk. The correspondent preferred not to be named but the elaborate correspondence is certainly interesting and valid.
'Please see below my correspondence with PCCW IMS's Business Netvigator tech staff regarding e-mail from Netvigator being blocked by spam filters in the United States. The original correspondence with the US security company, Robles, which directed my attention to Netvigator's abysmal anti-spam action levels, is also below.
'PCCW techies claim a lack of resources prevents them doing more - the company hides behind the absence of any law on spam and the weedy Ofta guidelines. But it is primarily up to [internet service providers] to stop the use of their servers for this nuisance and the resulting huge clog on bandwidth.
'It seems the only way to get our dominant player to actually clean up its act is to publicise how badly it is doing - which may be where you come in.
'Take a look at the Usenet group to which Robles refers and the SpamHippo results - interesting reading. It seems that Netvigator is the second-worst major consumer ISP in the world, after the French Wanadoo.'
It is not my intention here to put forward a spirited defence of Netvigator. The company has resources of its own for that. Nevertheless, it seems to me that we are dealing here neither with evil incarnate nor with pure-as-the-driven-snow innocence.
The news group mentioned above is NewsAdmin and there are several sections on spam. I had a look and got some interesting results. For five days in early January, I checked on the site for spam sources and our own Netvigator did indeed show up. It was ranked as follows: 13th, 15th, 53th, 31st and not on the list at all.
So, what does that mean? It almost certainly means spammers are a 'moving target' and the Big Boys - the ISPs and large telecommunications companies - are not agile enough to stay ahead.
I am reminded of what Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems and chief programmer for Unix and TCP/IP, said when he was still at Sun: 'Innovation happens elsewhere.'
He meant that a company can get so large it loses its ability to react quickly.
The hunt for viruses and spammers is a race against time. The fastest response to new viruses comes from a little company in Moscow: it consistently beats the big American companies. The reason is it does only one thing: it tracks down viruses and produces the signatures others use to block them.
Large companies nearly always get bogged down in internal politics and other issues that prevent them from doing what is amusingly referred to as the 'core business'.
One reason so many smaller companies have sprung up to counter the villains who are making online life so tedious and dangerous is that they are dedicated to what they are doing.
By all means, continue to complain to Netvigator. I think it does little harm to encourage it to do more. Perhaps it should be looking at hiring the services of these smaller companies?
In the meantime, you need to protect yourself and there are many ways to do that. Remember that being overzealous about this may kill mail you want. My mail filter is terrific but it still puts the occasional important message into the junk folder. I always check it before deleting the contents.
