Info on email blocking/blacklisting Date: Mon, 5 May 2008 14:35:13 -0500 (CDT) This may be of interest to many. Feel free to share it. ====================================== To: "NYCStreetArtists@yahoogroups.com" From: "Robert Lederman" Date: Mon, 5 May 2008 10:23:25 -0400 Subject: NEW blocked emails, blacklists, internet censorship Reply-To: NYCStreetArtists-owner@yahoogroups.com This is my followup to the the email, "Did you get this?" What I found out about emails being blocked: Blacklists So far I discovered that I am listed on 24 different email blacklists. This site is where I found that specific info: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx Below my comments on this are a few articles and quotes on the phenomena of my own (and your) emails being blocked. Apparently, the reasons for being blacklisted by email or internet providers are many and varied. They range from being something you yourself actually did to simply using a provider that another provider wants to block so as to destroy their business. An example of this might be AOL or Microsoft blocking emails from all Yahoo accounts simply because they are competitors. Being blocked for something you yourself actually did could include things like sending out SPAM emails involving financial scams or Viagra ads. Internet providers have a legitimate purpose in blocking those kinds of materials. In my case, the cause is sending out emails with political content that someone, either an individual or a government entity, does not like (such as the ARTIST list materials which for obvious reasons lots of people in NYC government, BIDs etc. wish did not exist). Years ago AOL admitted to me that they blocked my emails due to the specific political content of them, which tended to have a lot of material exposing corporate issues connected to Giuliani and the BIDs. More recently, it is possible that someone in a BID, the Parks Department, the SoHo Alliance or the Bloomberg Administration is trying to cripple the ARTIST group by screwing up our email communications. Nothing more technical is involved than filing a few complaints claiming I was "spamming" them with inappropriate material. As an "early adaptor" to the internet (having had a website and a huge email list as far back as 1993) I am a big fan of email. The downside of email is that, unlike the US Post Office, there is no guarantee that your message will ever be delivered. From the material below my comments you will get a sense of how prevalent the blocking of emails is. Apart from the corporate competition angle, various military contractors apparently now control all internet and telephone access in the US. It does not take too much imagination to see how that could affect every Americans freedom of speech. In an information age, he/she who controls all information controls everything. I got varied responses from the email I sent out, "Did you get this?" People on gmail all got it as did those on Yahoo. Almost no one on AOL seems to have received it even when I sent it to them one at a time. Very few people on Hotmail or Comcast got it. Some members got the email but when they tried to reply, it bounced back, their reply unsent. If you are going to contact me by email please always use this address only: artistpres@gmail.com I always get what you send to that address. Adding it to your address book will also help it get through. You can get your own free Gmail account at: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/about.html These accounts are accessible from any computer in the world, they are free, they have a huge 6 gigabyte capacity for your mail and the address will (allegedly) last a lifetime. Unless you set it to block something, it will get through. You can get a free Yahoo address at: http://info.mail.yahoo.com/ It is fairly dependable but slower. If Microsoft buys it (as is going on now), Yahoo will likely become much less dependable. The simplest and (only cost free) solution for the ARTIST group would be for each member to do two things. 1. Get a free email address from Gmail or Yahoo. Since the ARTIST list is on Yahoo, everything I send you from there will get through. 2. subscribe to the ARTIST list using THAT new address. Of course, to actually read the ARTIST mail you have to access your Gmail or Yahoo account. You can also direct Gmail or Yahoo to forward your mail to whatever address you prefer. For example, I set Comcast (the worlds worst cable company) to forward all my email to my Gmail account. Here is how to SUBSCRIBE to ARTIST or RESUBSCRIBE with a new email address... To subscribe send a blank email to NYCStreetArtists-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Reply to that email and you will officially be a member of ARTIST. (NOTE: Getting emails from me does not necessarily mean you are a registered member. Getting them via the ARTIST Yahoo site does.) At the website, please set your email preferences for either daily digest OR individual emails and please periodically check to see if your computer redirects them to a spam, junk or trash file. Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T. artistpres@gmail.com To visit the ARTIST website go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nycstreetartists/ (only subscribed members can access the materials) FROM: http://www.blacklistedip.com/ "All the major ISPs -- Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast and others -- block emails coming from blacklists. Your business suffers, when you cannot communicate with your customers. To ensure that your email marketing efforts do not suffer, it is important to monitor your IP addresses on a regular basis to check if you're on the blacklistb&.as many as 17% of emails from legitimate companies are erroneously blocked as spam and put on the IP Blacklist by an email provider." http://richardleggett.co.uk/blog/index.php/2007/05/15/hotmail_blocking_gmail >>>15/05/07 Hotmail Blocking Gmail Emails Filed under: General b Richard Leggett I'm absolutely sick of this situation. Every time I send an email to anyone in my family (who all use Hotmail because of the MSN Messenger legacy) the emails dont come through. They don't even go into their spam folders. Hotmail/Windows Live Mail is simply blocking the emails full stop, any other account I send them to works fine.<<< From: http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t972.html#endu Q: What is a blocklist? A: A blocklist helps ISPs to prevent spam coming to their customers. An ISP can use a blocklist (a list of IP addresses),to block (Reject) all email coming from a particular IP address. This rejection will cause your ISP to send you what is called a "bounce" message The blocking is based not on your email address (which looks like username[at]example.com), but on the IP address (which looks like 198.162.250.196). This IP address is assigned to the mail server you use, which is probably run by your ISP. You may share this same server with hundreds or thousands of other customers. If ONE of the other customers is sending spam through that shared mail server, it will cause the IP address of that mail server to be put on the blocklist. And when you send email through that server, ISPs who use blocklists to avoid receiving spam, will also block your email.<<< >>> http://www.businessknowhow.com/tips/blocked.htm Why Is My Mail to This Person Not Getting Through? by Leo A. Notenboom Spam is a real problem. With some people getting literally hundreds of unwanted messages per day a lot of internet service providers, as well as some individuals, are taking drastic steps to reduce the amount of junk mail in their inboxes. One of the largest is AOL. The problem with many of these anti-spam measures is that they can block legitimate email as well. Assuming that your email to other places is working, it's quite possible that that's what you're seeing. Legitimate email typically gets erroneously blocked for a couple of reasons: either the receiving system thinks your email looks too much like spam, or the receiving system thinks that you're sending it from an address that is or has been accused of being a spammer. Note that I said thinks - and it's the mistakes associated with that thinking that cause legitimate email to be mistaken for spam.<<< Check to see if you are on any blacklists: http://www.isipp.com/blacklists.php Here is an article from todays Washington Post on how a military contractor controls all internet and telephone communications in the USb&pretty scary stuff. "It's just a matter of time before Google and AOL and Facebook and LinkedIn are all managing communications between and among users," Ganek said." Washington Post The Ultimate Little Black Book One Firm Routes All Phone Calls in North America By Ellen Nakashima Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, May 5, 2008; D01 Once upon a time, there was one telephone company. Routing phone calls was pretty straightforward. Now there are hundreds, and it's much more complicated. Whenever someone dials a phone, texts on a cellphone or punches in a Web site on a laptop, chances are the connection will rely on a central database that belongs to a Northern Virginia firm. That database is perhaps the most significant cog in the communications network that most people have never heard of. Sterling-based NeuStar is the carriers' digital directory for all phone calls in North America. More than 800 telephone companies have numbers in the database. NeuStar assigns blocks of available telephone numbers to carriers. It also manages the directory for common short codes: five- or six-digit codes that people punch into their cellphones to take part in sweepstakes or to vote for game-show contestants, for instance. And about one out of every four Internet transactions is routed using a NeuStar database, as NeuStar handles traffic for domains that include .biz, .us, .org and .info. NeuStar's databases are so powerful that the FBI a few years ago sought direct, unfettered access to one containing 310 million phone numbers in the United States and Canada. The telephone companies that pay NeuStar to run the database denied the FBI's request, but they did allow NeuStar to create a site where authorized law enforcement officials with court orders can obtain carrier information on telephone numbers. NeuStar is part of an evolving telecom industry that is creating caches of information attractive to the government without clear guidelines governing who may have access and under what circumstances. Its registries fall under international, U.S. government and trade association rules, including those set by the Federal Communications Commission. The company is dependent on and crucial to telecom companies and state, local and federal governments, part of the government-industrial complex that drives the region's economy. Indeed, said Jeffrey E. Ganek, NeuStar chairman and chief executive, "this is a business that could only have grown up in Washington." NeuStar was once a division of Lockheed Martin, where, under a different name, it was created in part to help carriers manage one aspect of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That law made it possible for consumers to keep their phone numbers even if they switched service providers or moved to another state. Competing telephone companies needed a way to keep track of those numbers to route calls. And other information, such as billing data, the FCC said, needed to be provided by a neutral, trusted party. The current contracts, covering all of North America, run through 2015. The FCC created the rules that govern the contracts, but delegated oversight and administration of the contracts to the industry. The carriers in 1997 awarded the work to Lockheed Information Management Systems. In 1999, Lockheed spun off the division, and NeuStar was born. It went public in 2005. Revenue last year was $429.2 million, and profit was $92.3 million, up from $73.9 million the previous year. Company officials expect revenue to exceed $500 million this year. Soon, they said, NeuStar expects to be providing digital directory service for about 85 percent of all wireless devices in the world. NeuStar officials say the government has not sought direct access to any of its databases other than the one the FBI requested, which covered numbers kept by customers as they switched providers, called a ported number registry. But Al Gidari, a lawyer representing wireless carriers, said other major telecom entities -- billing vendors, 911 emergency service providers and call center operators -- have databases the government might want to tap. "If the government wanted access to their databases, there are no clear procedures regulating that access as there are for phone companies," he said. "That's a danger." NeuStar says trust is a significant part of its business. "If we were to precipitously allow some overzealous law enforcement official access to data that has not been formally authorized by the courts, we are instantly jeopardizing our franchise," Ganek said. NeuStar charges its client companies about 89 cents for every update to the ported number registry, about $500 to $1,000 a month for every common short code and about $5 a year for each entry in the Internet domain name registry. NeuStar also helps optimize Web traffic for clients such as Amazon so that when a customer types in Amazon.com, NeuStar directs the request to one of Amazon's thousands of servers around the world. It provides the same kind of service for Oracle, Emirates Airlines and Forbes. "We're at all the key Internet nodes in the world," Ganek said. "Depending on the time of the day and the point of origination, we send the traffic to Seattle, for instance, or to a data center in Miami or another data center in Singapore. If there's a fiber cable cut in the Pacific, we see it before [the carriers] do and turn the traffic in the other direction so it goes counterclockwise around the globe." NeuStar helps maintain communication during crises. The Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center took out a large AT&T switch that served 50,000 telephones for the Wall Street area, Ganek said. Within a week, AT&T found another switching device, trucked it into lower Manhattan and installed it at a telecommunications facility at 60 Hudson St. As soon as the switch was plugged in and the green lights on the control panel were blinking, NeuStar, instructed by AT&T, went into its database and deleted the World Trade Center address for each of the 50,000 numbers and replaced it with 60 Hudson St., Ganek said. "Within 10 seconds of making that change, anyone could dial those numbers and the calls were sent not to the World Trade Center, but six or seven blocks south," Ganek said. About 70 percent of NeuStar's revenue comes from its ported number database. But as more communication takes place over the Internet, Ganek foresees a need for more Internet routing information services. "It's just a matter of time before Google and AOL and Facebook and LinkedIn are all managing communications between and among users," Ganek said. In 2005, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration wanted a direct link to the database in NeuStar's Sterling headquarters, according to a January 2005 letter from the Justice Department criminal division to a consortium of carriers that have given NeuStar the contract to run the database. The department wanted to use the data to identify which carrier to subpoena for records concerning telephone numbers in an investigation, the letter said. "What they were asking for in a nutshell was a copy of the database," said Mike Warren, NeuStar vice president of fiduciary services. "They wanted us to send them an update of the database once a day." Instead, NeuStar set up LEAP, or Local Number Portability Enhanced Analytical Platform, a Web site to help local, state and federal law enforcement in investigations that rely on phone call surveillance. The database gives basic information such as carrier but not more technical details such as whether a phone number is for a wireless phone or a landline. Earlier this year, NeuStar added historical carrier information to that service. ----