Friday, June 22, 2007

BigPond deserves a big kick in the pants

The behavior of this Australian ISP [Internet service provider] with respect to French users is outrageous. Over the last few years, when my email address was sky.william@orange.fr, BigPond refused to deliver my emails to any of their customers. Since then I've changed my address to sky.william@free.fr, and I've just found that BigPond still refuses to deliver my emails to their customers. These French ISPs, Orange and Free, are two of the largest and most respected organizations in this domain, and BigPond's crazy idea of blacklisting all French customers is scandalous. It would be interesting to identify the BigPond employee who's behind this strategy.

I intend to lodge a formal complaint with the international email authorities concerning this curious BigPond behavior, which is not in keeping with the spirit of the Internet.

Here's the precise technical data [in which I've obliterated part of the email address of my intended receiver] confirming the blacklisting:

s***y@bigpond.com: host extmail.bigpond.com[144.140.90.13] said: 451 Mail from this IP address blocked due to DNS block list. (in reply to MAIL FROM command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; postfix2-g20.free.fr
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: EE6C213E75DF
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; sky.william@free.fr
Arrival-Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 12:45:37 +0200 (CEST)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; s***y@bigpond.com
Action: failed
Status: 4.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; host extmail.bigpond.com[144.140.90.13] said: 451 Mail from this IP address blocked due to DNS block list. (in reply to MAIL FROM command)

2 comments:

  1. This is weird! Why should Australian ISP blacklist users with a French email address? It does not make sense!

    You should try to open an email account with "operamail" or "gmail". It’s free and you’ll get an address like "xxx@operamail.com" or "xxx@gmail.com".

    Could be interesting to compare the results!

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  2. In November 2006, when I complained to BigPond, as a Wanadoo user, about this stupid blacklisting (described more precisely as DNS blocking), their postmaster sent me the following "explanation":

    Thank you for your email. wanadoo's mail server continue to be blocked by TrendMicro's MAPS RBL and QIL because Wanadoo continue to allow spam to be generated by their customers. Bigpond does not want their spam and blocks offending servers accordingly. Perhaps you should target Wanadoo to clean up their act then they would not be listed by TrendMicro.

    As you can see, BigPond considers that Wanadoo, from a spam viewpoint, belongs globally to the category of "offending servers"... because the Asian firm TrendMicro said so.

    Today, I'm shocked to discover that BigPond has included Free in their blocking procedure.

    As for the reasons why TrendMicro designates the major French ISPs as spam generators, I have no idea whatsoever.

    I have a gmail address, and it goes without saying that BigPond would not block emails sent from such an address. The blocking only concerns ordinary emails sent from either Wanadoo/Orange or Free.

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