Nick wants to know about how ISPs block mail and ….
Like many others i regularly have your newsletter blocked by my ISP. when i don’t get it i go to your website, copy and paste it into an email and send it to myself. a bit of a pain but it works fine. my question is why does my ISP block it when it comes from you but never when i send the same thing to myself?
Our answer
The spam filters and the criteria they use to censor email are arcane. What ISP is going to publish guidelines explaining how, exactly, they censor email?
Our newsletters, by their nature, discuss things that may be construed by some censorship (spam) filters as ‘triggers for spam”. Articles we write which discuss things such as spyware, viruses, Internet fraud and crime, hackers, adware, Trojans, botnets, and the like, by their very nature may contain words that set off spam (censorship) filters. And so, every week, we get a few dozen letters from subscribers who fear we may have gone belly-up and therefore did not send their newsletters. We’ve been teetering on the brink of financial ruin for a long time, but we’ve managed to keep going by cutting back and bracing ourselves against the adversity wrought by poverty. We’re not going belly-up — at least not yet. We’d never just leave subscribers hanging, in any case. If for some reason we were unable to publish an issue of Premium – we’d send you all a note and explain why we couldn’t. But so far, we’ve not missed an issue and we don’t foresee missing an issue. So it’s a pretty safe bet that your newsletter was sent on Friday afternoon. Subscribers who don’t receive it should assume their ISP has censored it and not that we didn’t send it. As soon as we’ve sent the newsletter on Friday, we post the new issue on your Premium Members’ home page. So if you see it there, you can be sure it was sent. We can’t guarantee your ISP will deliver it to you but if you see it posted on the Members’ home page, you can be 100% sure, it has been sent to you.
As for why, when you send it to yourself, you get the newsletter, we have no idea. Our guess would be that your ISP would never block anything sent by anyone using its mail servers to another using its mail servers. But as to the inner-workings of Rogers.com – we are clueless. It might be easier for you, just to copy the newsletter and paste it in an Email and just save the email in your “Drafts” folder. That would save you from having to send it to yourself, since that would also eliminate the header information and the To: From: Time: Date: info at the top.