The Computer Corner
By Charles Miller

Branded a spammer

The other night in the Jardín, I talked with one of San Miguel’s email spammers. You know who I am talking about…one of those people responsible for the billions and trillions of unsolicited junk emails clogging up the internet as well as my inbox.

This lady is a good person and did not intend to be a spammer, but through her actions got herself permanently labelled as one.

I do not need to go into detail here about how much of a problem has been created by the billions of unsolicited emails sent via the internet. What will be beneficial for some readers is to know what those in authority are doing about it.

In response to the flood of junk mail, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) around the world, such as BellSouth, Cybermatsa, Pacific Bell and Telmex, have started to take control of the electronic data packets passing through their networks. It is simple to identify the senders of large volumes of email, and the ISPs are now imposing limits on what individual customers may send.

Finding out where the limits are set is a real problem, specifically because ISPs do not publicize their limits and sometimes even deny any limits exist. Some say they do not want the spammers to know what the limits are lest they program their automated systems to function right up to the max.

The email provider I use in Pennsylvania was slightly more forthcoming and told me what my limits were, provided I would not tell anyone (so naturally I am sharing this with Atención readers, but not telling the name of the company). My account limit for sending outgoing mail is 50 messages or 50 megabytes in five minutes, 200 messages in one hour and a maximum of 500 messages in one day. Go over that limit, and my account is immediately cancelled.

The reason ISPs are starting to enforce such limits on the local level is if even one spammer is on the mail server in San Miguel, that runs the risk that the server itself could be blacklisted and thus all the other customers in town would suffer. On the national level, the big companies such as Bell Telephone or Telmex have a financial incentive to reduce the volume of spam their networks carry. Knocking a few billion spam per day off their system saves them money.

As to the San Miguel spammer, she got tagged for trying to send out a thousand emails to friends and clients. Now that she is labelled a spammer, her ISP permits her to send one email at a time. If she tries to send even two at a time, that is a no-go.

She wants to know if she could simply change her email address. The answer is no. Some spammers change their address 100,000 times per hour, but the ISPs are on to that. The outgoing email is blocked based on the IP address of the sender. The IP address is assigned by the ISP to your house. The only thing she could do to change this is to move from San Miguel to another city to get a new house with a new IP address.

While a rather drastic remedy for being branded a spammer, this is the new reality of email today. One of my fellow professionals says the magic number of emails is 20; send out more emails than that at one time and you could be skating on thin ice.

Professional services will send large numbers of emails for you. If you need to do this, you are well advised to pay for and use one of these companies so you are not personally branded as a spammer.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044 (415) 101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.