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That spam is choking the Internet nearly to the point of asphyxia is practically a given as 2005 opens. Statistics from Postini, an e-mail security company in California, show that as of Friday, 72 percent of all e-mail sent around the world is worthless junk. That's a staggering 124 million useless messages in the past 24 hours and 3.5 billion in the past 30 days clogging our in-boxes, wasting our time, slowing down Internet traffic, burdening service providers and potentially spreading viruses.
John Vincenzo is feeding you a line. Probably the same line that was fed to him.
Verizon isn't just blocking known spammers - it simply blocked huge swathes of the European IP space. I've been trying to communicate with my friends who are verizon.net customer using at least 3 different mail services (one ISP, one Internet application vendor, and one e-mail specialist service), and all were blocked peremptorily. If any of them are spam sources, none of the well known spam monitoring services are aware of it. In fact, if John Vincenzo would like to publicly name some of these so called spammers that he claims that his company has legitimately blocked, I have no doubt that his lawyers would be kept busy dealing with the defamation writs that would result.
The simple fact of the matter is that Verizon is the only company having this problem because Verizon made a really dumb decision that no other ISP is stupid enough to make, and the only way to get Verizon to admit that they screwed up, big time, it to publicize it. (Verizon still haven't informed their customers about what they really did). Statements by Verizon are simply vague, apparently written by marketing people who have absolutely no technical understanding of exactly what happened, and how it was implemented. (The Verizon spokesman that I spoke to last week tried to explain to me in 8th grade terms how "spam really slows the internet down" - when I asked him to have a specific IP address range unblocked he had no idea what I was talking about).
As for anonymity - I have called John Vincenzo, and left a message on his answering machine, asking that he resolve this issue, and leaving my phone number. I haven't recived a reply. (I'd send him e-mail, but I don't have any confidence that he'd reply to that either). Sure, I will post "anonymously" - after all, I don't want to give spammers access to my e-mail address. If John Vincenzo really wanted to deal with this issue of anonymity, he would provide a mechanism for people like me to communicate directly with Verizon, and provide the sort of details that I don't wish to post in public. But he hasn't done that, because he simply wants to cover up his companys screw ups, and disparage anyone who was impacted as a spammer.
Verizon isn't just blocking known spammers - it simply blocked huge swathes of the European IP space. I've been trying to communicate with my friends who are verizon.net customer using at least 3 different mail services (one ISP, one Internet application vendor, and one e-mail specialist service), and all were blocked peremptorily. If any of them are spam sources, none of the well known spam monitoring services are aware of it. In fact, if John Vincenzo would like to publicly name some of these so called spammers that he claims that his company has legitimately blocked, I have no doubt that his lawyers would be kept busy dealing with the defamation writs that would result.
The simple fact of the matter is that Verizon is the only company having this problem because Verizon made a really dumb decision that no other ISP is stupid enough to make, and the only way to get Verizon to admit that they screwed up, big time, it to publicize it. (Verizon still haven't informed their customers about what they really did). Statements by Verizon are simply vague, apparently written by marketing people who have absolutely no technical understanding of exactly what happened, and how it was implemented. (The Verizon spokesman that I spoke to last week tried to explain to me in 8th grade terms how "spam really slows the internet down" - when I asked him to have a specific IP address range unblocked he had no idea what I was talking about).
As for anonymity - I have called John Vincenzo, and left a message on his answering machine, asking that he resolve this issue, and leaving my phone number. I haven't recived a reply. (I'd send him e-mail, but I don't have any confidence that he'd reply to that either). Sure, I will post "anonymously" - after all, I don't want to give spammers access to my e-mail address. If John Vincenzo really wanted to deal with this issue of anonymity, he would provide a mechanism for people like me to communicate directly with Verizon, and provide the sort of details that I don't wish to post in public. But he hasn't done that, because he simply wants to cover up his companys screw ups, and disparage anyone who was impacted as a spammer.
