Cable Bahamas yesterday explained to The Tribune that it was "taking up the fight against spam on the Internet", after several businesses called this newspaper to complain that the company's action meant their operations had been disrupted because they were unable to send outgoing emails to current and potential clients.
But Andre Foster, the company's vice-president of information technology, told The Tribune that "true business customers" have a static IP address – as opposed to a dynamic one – that would exclude them from the extra filters and tracking the company had implemented to weed out spam emails and other junk.
It is understood, though, that many Bahamian businesses, especially smaller operations are using Cable Bahamas' residential package rather than the business cable modem product because it is less expensive, exposing them to the filter process the company has initiated. Mr. Foster urged all business customers who were experiencing problems sending outbound emails to "contact us and we will help them correct it".
One business, which spoke with The Tribune on the condition of anonymity said it believed about 50% of companies in New Providence would be affected by Cable Bahamas' new policy.
However, although the company agreed with Cable Bahamas' policy against spam, a source said: "It makes sense, I don't blame them, but they should have notified people in advance so they could take action before it was implemented."
Mr. Foster said Cable Bahamas implemented its new policy in the past week. All residential subscribers now have to send outbound emails throught the company's Coralwave mail server, which will monitor the type of messages being sent through and monitor any spam."
Mr. Foster explained that the reason residential subscribers would no longer be able to send emails through their own SMTP servers was because these are vulnerable to abuse from outside hackers, since they were unsecured, and outsiders could exploit such cracks in the system to send out spam emails and junk mail using Cable Bahamas' IP server address.
Other IP server addresses will block emails coming from servers where they received a high proportion of junk emails, and spam watchdog bodies have blacklisted some addresses and networks in the past.
An email posted on the www.bahamasb2b.com said yesterday that many Internet Service Providers (ISP's) in the US have blocked SMTP traffic coming from servers other than their own.
It said: "Cable have been forced to follow suit by the huge number of customers running (knowingly or otherwise) unsecured SMTP servers on their network/boxes.
"This has caused massive problems with spammers finding these boxes and using Cable Bahamas' network to distribute UCE… Cable had to find a compromise to ensure theirsubscribers could still send mail – the choice was no mail or Coralwave.
"Hopefully they will begin some kind of campaign to educate businesses on how to run a server properly, so they can remove the restriction for those of you that already do."
Mr. Foster said Cable Bahamas did not want to be "on the boat" of being blacklisted by spam watchdogs, adding that the company received regular reports from these entities on whether its network was being abused and seeking to be "proactive" in its approach. to the problem.
By Neil Hartnell, The Tribune
