Quote Originally Posted by Snoopy View Post
It is interesting that Vodaphone has blamed spam getting out of control for the demise of their e-mail service. Some years ago I had my own battle against spam. My ISP had a passive approach and claimed there wasn't much they could do about it. 95% of the spam was coming from China. Although most of the source ISPs concerned had a reporting address, they never replied to any of my complaints and the spamming continued. In the end my ISP managed to tweak their in house filtering to get the spam down. I think Shane Atkinson of Christchurch, being outed and convicted as the brains behind most of it helped too. But there is plenty more my ISP could have done in terms of blocking rogue domains and ISP fields. Personally I think the latter approach would have been the way to go. That way if there were any genuine customers that had their source ISP blocked, (which frankly I doubt) they could complain. A customer complaining is always more likely to be listened to, than some third party jock in another country the ISP probably hasn't heard of.

It sounds to me like Vodaphone are very lazy and think spam is someone else's problem. Personally I think any company that pulls their e-mail service is no longer a serious player in the ISP business. The idea of having spammers being able to sign up on a free account to 'sharetrader' in a way that is repeatable and unable to be controlled sounds like a medium term death sentence for the forum to me. The paid up address requirement was introduced for a reason. I think the join up rule needs to stay as it is BlackPeter. You have to forget Vodaphone - they are no longer in the ISP business in my eyes. Move your business to a provider that is a proper committed ISP.

SNOOPY
I agree, Snoopy - but this is probably a discussion for the Vodafone thread on the NZX forum. My post here was just meant as a reminder to the sharetrader admins to review their sign up policy.