UPDATE: Crikey! Telstra moves on BigPond e-mail claims - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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UPDATE: Crikey! Telstra moves on BigPond e-mail claims

By Iain Ferguson, 0
November 21, 2003
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/UPDATE-Crikey-Telstra-moves-on-BigPond-e-mail-claims/0,139023166,120281249,00.htm

Acknowledging he "might have gone over the top with his Telstra spray," Stephen Mayne, the founder of crikey.com.au, has acknowledged that Telstra's BigPond spam filters, rather than e-mail service difficulties, were responsible for blocking delivery of his newsletters to BigPond subscribers.

In a statement posted yesterday evening on crikey.com.au -- a widely read political and business commentary Web site -- Mayne said "it turns out that Telstra's heavy-handed mail servers were blocking our bulk mail-outs to BigPond dial-up customers because they were recognised as spam.

"But today our technical staff spoke to the right people at Bigpond and had the IP addresses of our mail servers added to the list of servers that are authorised to send bulk e-mail to BigPond recipients.

"The limit for those not on the authorised list is 100 e-mails at once".

Mayne's statement -- which replaced his original remarks -- came after Telstra denied the newsletter difficulties were related to any ongoing problems arising from the e-mail brown-out. That brown-out saw BigPond e-mails delayed by up to several days due to a surge in spam and virus traffic which drove total e-mail volumes beyond the capacity of the system to cope.

A Telstra spokeswoman said yesterday the problems originally detailed on the site were "not indicative of any other customer experience," adding that the BigPond e-mail service was working well following the implementation of additional capacity.

Mayne had posted a message to all subscribers with BigPond e-mail addresses -- 1,957 of 17,066 addresses in total -- on his Web site on Wednesday, saying "We're still getting many complaints from BigPond customers who are not getting their daily Crikey e-mails and have missed numerous editions over the past month.

"It's time to crank up the campaign against Telstra so we'd love to hear from you about your specific problems with the BigPond service over the past month".

Mayne said today he was "still interested" in hearing about those experiences.

Telstra recently outlined an AU$100 million program of improvements designed to boost its BigPond e-mail capacity, a move which reportedly includes the release of a tender for a new e-mail platform.