Blacklisted !

I had an unsettling experience yesterday. I was blacklisted by a spam-watch company for spamming.

Of course, I don't spam, never have spammed, never will spam. In fact, I despise the practice and occasionally take the trouble to write back to spammers to let them know what I think of them. (Sometimes I have a little fun and disguise my email address as mad-dog@nationalfront.co.uk or mustapha@alexamartyrsbrigade.iq - in the hope I can give them a sleepless night or two.) So it's a bit much when my emails (to one of my customers) start bouncing from their site saying I've been locked because I'm a spammer!

So I called up my customer's IT helpdesk and explained they were blocking me erroneously. Yep, they said, sorry about that but there's nothing we can do about it. Apparently, they subscribe to a service that provides them with lists of who to block and they can't do anything to modify those lists. Well, call your service and thell them they've made a mistake, I reasonably requested. Can't do that either, they said. The service they subscribe to takes many 'feeds' from other organisations and the one that had blacklisted me was one of those.

Oiling the barrel on my Kalashnikov, I went to this evil company's website. They seemed pretty proud of their ridiculous service. In fact, I discovered, when they find a spammer, their normal practice - and you may want to sit down before I tell you this - is to blacklist the ISP from which the spam originates! They quite happily state this on their website as if it is a good thing! Who do these morons think they are? Their recommended fix for the problem of having your business disrupted by them is to take it up with your ISP.

So I emailed my ISP with their recommendation - and my email bounced - because I was blacklisted. So I phoned my ISP who said they'd get on to the collection of scabrous mongrels who had blighted my day and ask them to un-blacklist me. Which they did and, shortly, I was able to email people again. Gee, thanks everybody.

But isn't it sad that we live in world like this? Isn't it awful that there are people who spam people? Isn't it sickening that disrupting my business seems like a good idea to the people who want to stop spam? It's as if, in order to stop my letterbox being stuffed with about half a dead tree's worth of junk mail each week, I would be allowed to go to my local post office and nail planks across their door. Or, in order to stop random Indians phoning me every evening with unintelligible offers, I should be able to go and cut all the cables at my local phone exchange. Is this really the kind of world we want?

Of course not! There are some things worse than spam.