Verizon faces lawsuit over email blocking

Found on The Register on Friday, 21 January 2005
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Aggrieved Verizon customers are invited to join a class action that seeks damages arising from the US ISP's enthusiastic email filtering policies. Philadelphia law firm Kohn, Swift & Graf, P.C. filed suit this week against Verizon on behalf of a DSL subscriber in a civil case that seeks class action status.

Since 22 December, mail servers at verizon.net have been configured to reject connections from Europe and other parts of the world including China and New Zealand by default, according to Reg readers and industry sources such as MessageLabs.

John Vincenzo, a spokesman for Verizon, told us that the "vast majority" of Verizon's 4m dial-up and DSL customers are happy with its "long standing" policy on spam and virus filtering. He conceded that some otherwise legitimate email has been blocked but gave no indication that Verizon has any plans to review its policy.

According to Vincenzo, spam complaints come from spammers themselves.

Perhaps the "vast majority" hasn't figured out why they don't receive some emails. Nevertheless, the primary goal is to eliminate spam, yes. But the important factor is to avoid false posivites. That's why the industry is working on good filters. If it was as simple as blocking countries, someone would have thought of that (well, someone at Verizon had an idea, yet the most stupid one ever).