Top 6 reasons why your message might be bounced.

Please be aware that when ZiaNet blocks a source of spam, we do so based on actual samples of UCE, complaints from our customers, or large flows of SPAM from a particular network or server.

• We do not examine your email.
• We are not calling you a spammer.
• We cannot block your email address

We have no interest in blocking legitimate email, and we make every effort to block only when UCE or SPAM from a server threatens the viability of our service.

Here are the most common reasons for a block:

1. Your provider, ISP or Hosting service, is or has been a source of a lot of SPAM at some time. ZiaNet's servers were overun by thousands of SPAM messages per minute, and our postmaster blocked the IP address of the server(s) this SPAM was coming from. The provider may or may not have discovered, and stopped, the offending activity.
   
   
2. Your provider resides in a network node that tolerates SPAM, and has over time been a regular source of unsolicitied commercial email. ZiaNet customers have complained. Our postmaster has collected hundreds of samples and figured out a block of IP addresses to restrict, in order to prevent the continued abuse of our service.
   
   
3. Your provider does not run their own mail server; they lease server service or contract a third party to send out bulk mailing for them. The bulk mailer has, at some time, been identified as a source of SPAM.
   
   
4. Your provider has recently added servers or IP address space. The address space assigned by ARIN was previously owned by an abusive provider. ZiaNet had them blocked (see 1- 3). They went out of business and surrendered their IP address block(s) back to ARIN, who then granted the address space to your provider. There is no formal mechanism for reporting or tracking this information, so ZiaNet has your mail server blocked for no good reason. We would like to fix this immediatly.
   
   
5. Your provider does not route their own email, they have another provider do it for them. The other provider's mail server is used by many such customers, and some of them have, at some time, been identified as a large source of SPAM.
   
   
6. Your provider set up a mail server that is an Open Relay, allowing any computer, anywhere in the world, to use it as a sending mail server. ORDB has discovered this and blacklisted that server. ZiaNet subscribes to ORDB. In this case, the server operator must configure the mail server to disallow open relay. There is nothing ZiaNet can do about it.

Notes.

Every computer connected to the Internet has an IP (Internet Protocol) address. Every IP address is unique. ZiaNet mail servers process from 2 to 5 million mail messages each day. It is not possible to "filter" the contents of these messages or the address they are sent from. We do have a handful of filters that look for the most common virus attachments to mail messages. It is very costly to do even this much filtering.

We are not smug about blocking servers! We get blocked from time to time too. Sometimes it is a case of mistaken identity. Sometimes a rogue got loose on our network for a few minutes and managed to send out several thousand messages before we shut them off. These things can happen. Again, we make a reasonable effort to block only in defense of our service.

If we did not block servers in this manner, no amount of computing power would suffice to deliver legitimate email. Our customers could not find it amidst all of the SPAM in their in boxes in that case anyway. As of this writing, about 80% of email traffic is SPAM.