You may recall that a short time ago I published a short account of a large ISP company getting it wrong. They had blacklisted me (Wrongly I might add) for sending e mails to any of their customers; and as a friend of mine was with them she could not receive any of my e mails. I am glad to say that this pathetic cock up has now been resolved. This little saga only goes to prove one thing. Do not believe the bovine excrement that these companies push at you.

Modern day Lunacy

This has to do with a service provider in the UK called Tiscali. It is
something that has happened to me in the past month and I am incandescent
with rage about it. It’s not the fact that it causes me a very slight
inconvenience; it is the sheer principle of the thing.

I have a very small circle of friends with whom I share e mails more or less
on a daily basis. One of these friends is supposedly served by this Tiscali
company. Unable to sleep one night I sent her an e mail which was an
innocuous joke and telling her that I was still awake at three in the
morning. I sent her another one about ten minutes later, only this one came
back as Failed. The reason that it had failed was not the usual reasons. Oh
no, this time it came back as BLACKLISTED. Now I had never heard of anybody
being blacklisted so why me, what had I done and what are they talking about
As I have said I only have a half a dozen people that I send e mails to, so
what can I have done to upset this company? I have to admit I do send e
mails to news papers and TV news rooms. But that is only when there is
something on the news that aggravates me and I voice my opinion. Having no
knowledge of this blacklisting business I trawl the web to see if there is
any information on this subject. Eventually I come up with a site that tells
me.
Now this is where it gets interesting. These companies that run our broad
band, if they suspect that you are sending SPAM they blacklist your IP
address. I was under the impression that spam was hundreds if not thousands
of e mails per day, and that the purpose of these e mails was advertising. I
never realized that e mailing a pal complaining about your dog doing a
whoopsy on the new rug was classified as spam. I have just run a check on my
e mails and the average e mails sent by me is 226 per month. That is 7.5 per
day. Out of those 226, 196 are to friends and family and the rest is to the
media or mail order companies for my wife’s card making.

Now comes the nasty bit. From what I have read there is no means of
rectifying this situation. There is no way to ask these people why they have
done this; or if they have made a mistake can they unblacklist me. They
didn’t even ask me if I was running a business and would this blacklisting
affect it. Tiscali have never sent me an e mail saying we don’t like what
you’re sending to your friends, your jokes stink, we disagree with your
politics or even your spelling is rubbish and that’s why we’ve done it. Of
couse it could be that they have seen my face on a site and thought, “You’re
an ugly critter matey, so we’re going to fix your wagon”. That one I could
understand!

My machine is fully protected with Spyware killers virus killers and the
like, so I know the machine is not infected or being used as a zombie.
Unless Tiscali can prove to me otherwise? I fully understand that spam
should be stopped and I agree that it’s a blight on the net, but my puny
circle of e mail addresses? Come on get real.

But this is where I really get angry. If my phone provider is cable and I
make a phone call. And if a voice comes on the line and says “Your number is
blacklisted and you can no longer call anyone who is connected to the
overland line. And we are not going to tell you why we have done this”.
Should I not be able to ask the question why?
Now I am not of this technological era, the house where I was born had gas
as a form of lighting. So for me to deal with and understand how to rectify
a mess that a multimillion pound company has made is asking a bit much. I
struggle with the mobile phone that was given me, apparently it has a WAP
thing and a Multimedia whatsit as well as little tiny buttons that I need a
magnifying glass to see, but give it to my nine year old grandson and he’s
got the thing washing the dishes. So what chance have I got?

Oh by the way Tiscali. My friend is moving her Internet service provider to
the same one that I have. And since she is the only one of my friends that
is using your service, I care not one jot about you and neither of us will
be bothering you again.

In order to resolve this matter I sent an e mail to Tiscali informing them of this problem. They, in due course, replied with an e mail the contents of which can be seen below.

Dear Sir,

Thank you for contacting Tiscali Customer Support.

Firstly, I do apologise for the inconvenience caused by this issue.

Unfortunately there is not a lot that we can do at Tiscali regarding the issue of you having been blacklisted regarding youre spam emails.

It would seem that someone has reported that you have been sending spam emails though I doubt that you would send this kind of email.

I would advise that you contact your email Abuse Team of your Broadband provider and ask why this has happened and ask to be removed from this list.

Again, I do apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Kind regards,

Brenda Page,

Tiscali Billing and Customer Care

Tiscali UK Limited
Registered in England and Wales No. 3408171
Registered Address: 20 Broadwick Street, London W1F 8HT


So there we have it; it’s not their problem and there is nothing they can do about it. Hence my next step was to contact my own Service Provider, this I did in a very prompt manner and with a few choice words informed them of the situation. Stating of course, that Tiscali had indicated that it was their faulty that I had been blacklisted for sending spam. There seemed to me to be a distinct lack of action on the part of my Service Provider, the silence on their part was truly deafening.
So much so that for a time I thought they had departed for distant shores leaving behind them a rather empty building. Then came a surprise, I sent an E Mail to my friend and low and behold it was received, with a communication by return saying as much. Oh wondrous joy, prayers of thanks were said and parties given. Church bells tolled the good news and street criers gave voice to this happy event.
A couple of days after that I received an epistle from my Internet Service provider with an explanation as can be seen below.


Dear Mr -------,

Please accept our apologies for the delay in responding to the email you
Sent to TalkTalk. We always aim to provide a high level of customer
Service and will ordinarily respond to emails promptly.

I can confirm that this issue should now be fully resolved. We recently
Became aware a range of TalkTalk IP addresses had been blacklisted by a
Spam company called Spam Cannibal used by Tiscali and Lineone ISP's.

This was causing the e-mail from some of our customers to be blocked and
Not delivered to their intended recipients on Tiscali or Lineone. This
Was raised to our networks team who have contacted Spam Canibal/Tiscali
To have this listing removed.

This means that you should now be able to send emails through again, but
There may still be a overlap of a day or two as the updates propagate
Around the servers owned by Spam Cannibal/Tiscali.

If you require any further technical assistance please contact us on

So there we have it. It was Tiscali to blame all along; and no they can’t blame another firm for this because they were just the agents of Tiscali and as such it is Tiscali that are ultimately to blame.

Tiscali.com will be forever to me Tripe.com