BT anti-spam drive backfires on users

Thanks Paul Stockton for sending this in.

A move by BT to cut out spam passing through its servers has ended up deleting valid emails sent out by some of BT's ADSL customers.

BT introduced the measures, which entailed filtering out and deleting emails that looked like spam, on Tuesday. But the company failed to tell its customers about the new policy and as a result some had their outgoing emails filtered and deleted too.

UK software developer Barwick Systems, which uses a BT ADSL account for email and Web connectivity, was one company affected. However, said network manager Paul Stockton, the company did not discover the emails were going missing until Wednesday, when customers rang to say that emails they were expecting had not arrived.

Initially, said Stockton, BT said the problem lay with the email client his company used. Barwick Systems uses the Eudora mail client with Winroute Pro as an SMTP server. "They said they don't offer support unless we use (Microsoft) Outlook," said Stockton. "I didn't want to get into argument about why we don't use Outlook in our company because of viruses, but told them it was nothing to do with the email client... According to our log files the emails had been sent out and had gone through BT's SMTP server at smpt.btclick.com."

Knowing that the emails had left his building, Stockton now wanted to know where they had gone. The problem was, he said, that every email being sent out through his company's BT ADSL connection had disappeared off the face of the planet.

News source: ZDNet UK News - BT anti-spam drive backfires on users