BT blocked by spam blacklist
"Dangerously misconfigured, insecure or abuseable servers" the cause
of the
problem...

Despite maintaining a strong anti-spam stance BT has been rocked by
allegations
that its own servers are "dangerously misconfigured, insecure or
abuseable" and are
exposing email users to the threat of increased levels of unsolicited
mail.

A number of BT customers attempting to email friends and colleagues
have been
perplexed by their emails bouncing back with a delivery error message
but a note on
one spam blacklisting site, the Distributed Server Boycott List
(DSBL.org), explains
why this is happening.

"The person who runs the mail server at that address has chosen to
refuse email from
dangerously misconfigured, insecure, or abuseable servers based on a
list that we
publish. They most likely did this because blocking mail that
originates from servers
in our list can significantly reduce the amount of spam that users of
their mail server
receive."

The problem occurs whenever somebody attempts to email a server which
references
the DSBL blacklist in its anti-spam configuration.

Kevin Fiske, one BT customer who experienced the annoyance of the
blacklisting
first-hand, found he was unable to email a variety of servers from
any address within
his company.

Fiske said: "This has been going on for about a year now and it is an
extreme irritant.
It has caused us great embarrassment, particularly with one major
client who saw the
error notification and assumed we must be blacklisted because we have
been
spamming people, which obviously isn't the case."

"Email is vital to our business," he added. "We would be completely
lost without it as
the number of times we go on site to visit people has fallen. People
now expect to do
business electronically but while we continue to see several mails
bounce back each
week, we are basically stuffed until BT sorts out the problem and
gets itself removed
from the blacklist."

A spokesman for BT Openworld today confirmed the problem.

"We understand that we have been blacklisted by the Distributed
Server Boycott List
(DSBL) due to their concerns about a perceived configuration error of
BT Connect's
mail servers," he said.

"This has resulted in BT Connect's servers currently being blocked by
the DSBL
blacklists. We do not believe there are any problems with the
configuration of the BT
Connect mail servers as shown by the fact that they have not been
included on any
other blacklists. This seems to be a unilateral stance taken by DSBL
and we are
liaising with DSBL and the ISPs that utilise their blacklist in an
attempt to resolve the
issue to minimise inconvenience to customers."

A particularly ironic twist in the tale means that Fiske is even
unable to report
genuine spammers because of this problem.

"In the richest of rich ironies, BT's failure leaves us unable to
even report spam that
we receive to spamabuse.org because it too uses DSBL as a reference,"
he said.

Fiske has also been angered by announcements from within BT about its
stance on
the problem of spam.

"For Duncan Ingram [MD of BT Openworld] to express 'astonishment' at
the level of
spam is cant of the highest order," he said.

"Ingram's company actually contributes to spamming because it
consistently fails to
operate its mail servers in a way that prevents relaying."

Another BT customer, Stephen Fleming, told silicon.com the biggest
concern with this
blacklisting is that contacts or business associates may assume the
blacklisting is
evidence the BT customers are the ones guilty of spamming.
"Fortunately I've not had
that kind of response yet but it is definitely a real fear," he said.
"We never spam."

Fleming added: "I was underwhelmed by BT's response and I'm now
looking for
alternatives. I'm not a very happy customer."

Will Sturgeon