Verizon Communications customers expecting e-mail from across the pond may be in for a long wait. The internet service provider has been blocking e-mail originating from Great Britain and other parts of Europe for weeks, and customers are upset about having their communications disrupted without notice.
Verizon began blocking ranges of IP addresses belonging to British and European ISPs on Dec. 22, according to the company. The blacklisting of e-mail from abroad was in response to spam coming from the region, according to a customer service representative at Verizon who identified himself only as "Gary." He said company policy prevents him from giving out his last name.
Since Dec. 28, dozens of Verizon customers have been posting their frustrations on Verizon.adsl and verizon.email.discussion-general newsgroups about being unable to receive e-mail from Britain, Germany, France and Russia. Verizon customers describe the frustrations of not knowing how many e-mails have been blocked and receiving contradictory information from Verizon's customer service, and anger at switching to free e-mail accounts until the problem is resolved.
"What essentially this policy has done is to make it clear to me that unless they change their policy, Verizon's e-mails are not reliable enough even for non-critical home usage," said Verizon user Robert Jacobson of Brooklyn, New York, in an e-mail to Wired News.
Ashley Friedlein, CEO of consulting firm E-consultancy.com in London, said several of his e-mails to Verizon customers bounced back but he assumed that the recipient's inboxes were full.
Friedlein sees irony in an American ISP blocking e-mail from Europe. "I feel a bit affronted because most of the spam we get is from the U.S.," Friedlein said. He said that some of his bounced messages were replies to e-mails, "which is about as un-spammy as you can get."
Mike Teixeira, a blacklist investigator for Mail Abuse Prevention Systems, or MAPS, which provides ISPs with lists of known spammers, said his company is always updating its blocking list, adding and removing IP addresses that indicate the country of origin.
Wired News checked several e-mail accounts from Britain and Germany that were being blocked by Verizon, and none of them were on MAPS' list of known spammers. Teixeira said it was unusual to block e-mail coming from a geographic region. "We would never block a whole country and say, 'England is bad.'"
"Telephony companies are not so experienced in managing e-mail," said Dave Ferris, president of Ferris Research. "It's easy to set the filters too strong" and block valid addresses, he said, adding that companies need to be able to dynamically filter spammers instead of maintaining lists that can quickly become obsolete.
Ferris said ISPs such as AOL and MSN were making similar mistakes a year ago during their spam-fighting efforts. "It sounds like (Verizon is) going through a learning curve," he said.
Verizon media relations manager Ells Edwards said he did not know when Verizon would discontinue its blocking of the European e-mail. "Normally these things abate in a matter of days," Edwards said.
Verizon has more than 3 million DSL customers, according to Edwards.
Edwards suggested that Verizon customers who are waiting for an e-mail response from Europe should use alternative forms of communication. "If it's really important you might want to make a phone call," he said.
