With all the spam, email scams, and email phishing going on, we have had to take drastic measures to protect our clients world wide.  As a result, it has been our policy in the past to give email hosting providers, and others involved in the delivery of email or the assignment of IP addresses, the chance to resolve spam problems that are initiated by their customers, then block servers contolled by those companies if they fail to act.  In most cases these companies resolved the issues and the spammer is blocked from sending the spam from their email servers.  Some companies simply did not care that they were being used for sending spam.  Most of those who did not care were outside of the United States.  As a result, we started blocking mail for us and for our clients that originated from ip addresses controlled by these uncaring, indifferent, rogue companies.

However, recently there have been some suprising additions to our list of uncaring, indifferent, rogue companies and the ip addresses of their servers.  Namely there are now three US based companies who have now made the list:

• Microsoft Hotmail, from Redmond, Washington
• Burstnet, from Scranton, Pennsylvania
• Yahoo!, from Sunnyvale, California

The most recent in this list is Yahoo!.  They made the list because of an apparent decision on their part to ignore the problem of spam.  When we recently tried to report the spam, all of our spam reporting avenues had been cut off.  Instead, we are forced to create a Yahoo! account in order to report the spam.  While forcing those who really don't want to use their services to become members increases their membership numbers and makes them look better than they really are to their stockholders, it is disingenuous to do so.  They apparently also refuse to process spam sent to their abuse email address (see discussion).  As a result, we are forced to begin blocking their email servers for our clients.  We understand there are other companies who are moving to do the same thing.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause you.  If you are currently using any of the email providers listed in our blacklist, please open an account with a reputable email provider if you wish to communicate with us or our clients world wide.