Email UCE/Spam Abuse

Net Communications does not tolerate the sending of spam or UCE.  It is our policy that customers may NOT send UCE/Spam through any of our servers.

Definition of Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), or SPAM:
An electronic message is “spam” IF: (1) the recipient’s personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (2) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent; AND (3) the transmission and reception of the message appears to the recipient to give a disproportionate benefit to the sender.

For further information on spam and UCE please visit the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) web site 

Net Communications reserves the right to terminate, without warning, any account that violates this policy. Usage of Net Communications services constitutes acceptance and understanding of this policy.

Net Communications reserves the right to decide what it considers “SPAM”, “UCE”, “mail bombing”, or “bulk email”, and to determine from all of the evidence whether or not our email system has been abused or misused.

This was first published and sent to all SMTP customers on April 27th 2003 please see this news story.

By default some versions of MICROSOFT EXCHANGE SERVER (the server program that handles your email) and some other email servers can be used as Open Relays (SPAM RELAY). This means that when your server is online, spammers on the internet can freely send spam through your server, and then in turn through our email server, gilliam. Spammers use this trick to hide where the spam originates from.

Usually Exchange Servers get used as spam relay when someone has upgraded the server or reinstalled Microsoft Exchange and forgotten to setup the relay list securely. There is no straightforward check for you to see if your server is an Open Relay so we suggest that you contact your systems administrator for assistance. We can however help in reconfiguring your Exchange Server over the telephone should you require this.

We must remind you that Net Communications always does everything in its power to prevent spam and tackle spammers head on. We will not tolerate any of our customers sending spam email whatever the reason or cause.

Please be aware that it takes a considerable amount of our time to clean spam out of our mails systems, the normal charge for this is £150 +VAT.

Please be aware that should someone else use your Microsoft Exchange server as a spam relay this most likely will result in us charging you £150 +VAT so please make use of our Technical Support to insure this doesn’t happen to you.

All shared hosting mailboxes will be protected by our anti-spam and anti-virus solution, StriKe.

If you should have any questions about this then please do not hesitate to contact us on support@netcom.co.uk