Increased filtering and blocking of email to defend recipients of email from the massive growth
in spam email abuse sometimes leads to blocking of email from entities that are not themselves
spamming or supporting spam abuse. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the current state of
affairs.
However, it is important to remember that usually this is a result of the actions,
or rather, the inactions, of the ISPs hosting the blocked IPs that might be considered
collateral damage.
ISPs that continue to accept as customers not only legitimate customers
but customers committing spam email abuse, or hosting spam email support sites, such as
the web sites advertised in spam email, or violating other machines on the Internet by
relaying through SMTP relays, open proxies, or hijacked PCs infected by Swen and Mydoom
and similar viruses/worms, are just as guilty as the spammers, and must take
responsibility for their failure to remove the abusers from their networks.
As a result, widening blocklisting of larger netblocks at such ISPs has increasingly become one of
the tools utilized by network administrators trying to defend their customers and their email services.
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