[SystemSafety] Name and Shame - Key but off-topic

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

Folks,

in early 2016 I suddenly discovered I couldn't communicate by email with some key colleagues,
amongst them Mike Parsons; a former Concorde Chief Aerodynamicist who has worked for us; the former
head of security at UK ONR. The reason was that they all had email accounts with btinternet, and
btinternet was apparently blocking all emails from the University of Bielefeld domain. There is a
procedure to raise a flag and have one's communication attempt processed, but it appears to be fake.

It has now happened again with tiscali, from my current email service provider, this time with email
to a colleague who is a former head of CESG. This time without a (pseudo-)rectification procedure.
Tiscali says it has received too many spam emails from my "email provider".

Technically, this is nonsense. My university email service is provided directly by people I know and
can talk to, from machines which they administer, and the email headers are annotated accordingly.
They do not forward spam. In fact, they do not forward anything. And nobody is hacking in to send spam.

I am moderately convinced, but do not know for sure, that similar is true of the mail forwarder
which my current email service provider uses.

I can tell quickly from an email header, with few exceptions, whether it comes from where it says it
comes from. These service providers btinternet and tiscali are not parsing the headers properly.

Has anyone else had similar phenomena occur to them? Private mail, please. Name and shame appears to
be the only option open to sufferers. I am thinking of starting with a blog post.

Formerly, communications service providers had a legal obligation to deliver properly-addressed
communications. Not on the internet. Big companies can do what they want. Welcome to Galbraith's
world, if you didn't already know you were in it (
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00h3y23/episodes/guide ).

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
MoreInCommon
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de





-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 163 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/mailman/private/systemsafety/attachments/20161116/72b238d6/attachment.pgp>