Letter from Lisa Micklin
Communications – November 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
An open letter to Ctelco Internet and FairPoint Communications:
I remember fondly when the Ctelco office was a doublewide trailer behind the Hooper school. It was always a pleasure to pay my phone bill in person so that I could visit with all of you. As the San Luis Valley grew, I was so proud of you when your new office was built in Mosca. And, imagine my thrill when you made Hot Mouse Wireless DSL available to us!
However, as your company has continued to grow, I am aware that you are more and more at the mercy of your parent corporation FairPoint Communications. With this growth has come an increasing disregard for your DSL customers, as well as a decrease in your response time to some very grave issues that are potentially injuring local homegrown Internet businesses in the region.
Many months ago you installed a piece of software on your email servers called “Spam Assassin.” Despite documentation that came with the software when you installed it encouraging you to notify all of your email customers about the software,
(http://spamassassin.apache.org/tag/ -see section entitled “this is the first I’ve heard about it,”) you chose rather to leave us in the dark.
Suddenly your email users saw a decrease in their spam, which is wonderful, but they also saw a decrease in their legitimate incoming email. As a resident “computer expert,” many of your customers called me. I advised them to call your support desk and tell you to turn off Spam Assassin on their accounts. To their collective awe, suddenly dozens of legitimate emails were delivered to them that Spam Assassin had falsely tagged as spam. Nonetheless, the majority of your email customers are still in the dark about this software and have no idea why they haven’t heard from “Auntie Sue” in months.
Recently, it has come to my attention that every single piece of outgoing email sent through Ctelco is getting tagged as spam. Not some, not occasionally, but every one of the millions of emails that your customers are sending through your email server. Most of your customers will never notice this tagging, as it is embedded in the email “headers” of their emails, which most people do not know exist, let alone how to view.
Those of us who are in Internet based businesses are having their businesses injured because of this tagging. It is injurious not only in that it vastly increases the likelihood that our emails are being thrown into recipients spam and trash bins without ever being seen by them, but also in the decrease of our professional image as business owners.
In my correspondence with you on this matter, I find it fascinating that your own company’s emails are sent through a totally different server than your customers’ — a server that does not have this software installed.
Please don’t misunderstand me. Spam Assassin is a wonderful tool that can greatly decrease the amount of spam that your customers receive and potentially send. However it only works if it is configured properly. It is blatantly obvious that it is not properly configured on the Ctelco email server. To test this, any one of your customers can send themselves a simple email that says “hello,” view the full headers of that email upon receipt, and see that it is tagged as spam.
Despite numerous emails to your office as well as phone calls to your third party contracted tech support team, nothing is being done to remedy the situation.
Once again, this time more publicly, I petition you to remedy the situation. It is a simple configuration that any mail server administrator can perform. If you find that you do not have someone in your company who can carry out this simple task, do feel free to contact me and I will be glad to connect you with numerous email server administrators who would be happy to assist you.
Respectfully,
Lisa Micklin
Crestone
FairPoint Communications can be contacted at www.fairpoint.com or 704-344-8150
Ctelco can be contacted at www.ctelco.net or 719-378-2231.
[EDITOR’S NOTE:
The header on this e-mail contained the following:
X-Spam-Report: -0.1/5.0
This mail is probably spam. The original message has been attached along with this report, so you can recognize or block similar unwanted mail in future…]
