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By Ben King, 9 July 2002 17:10

NEWS BT customers have been seeing mail disappear at random since November as spam filtering software removes legitimate emails by mistake. The problem stems from a spam filtering service called Spamcop, which collates lists of mail servers which are being used to send out unwanted email messages or spam. BT's mail servers, it seems, are being regularly used by spammers. When they are identified as a source of spam, they are added to Spamcop's blacklist. An ISP which uses Spamcop's software will then treat any mail coming from those servers as spam - in other words, delete all mail from that server, including legitimate emails, without trace. For example, BT mail server mta04.btfusion.com, which handles mail for a proportion of BT customers, has been listed over twenty times by Spamcop since the service was established in its present form in November 2001. Mail servers are removed from the Spamcop list after a week, so the problem appears only intermittently - making it harder to track down and deal with. One silicon.com reader found that mails sent from his BT ADSL line to customers were disappearing without trace as the Spamcop filters on their internet connections mistook them for spam and filtered them out. He said: "It took a while to work out what was happening as we weren't being told that the mail wasn't getting through. We don't know how much business we have lost." A spam expert, who declined to be named, suggested that spammers could be accessing BT's mail servers in several different ways - either by hacking into the machines themselves, or by registering for dial-up accounts and using them as temporary spam outlets. A spokesman for BTopenworld said: "We take the issue of spam seriously but there is always a question of definition. It's difficult for an ISP to distinguish the character of material passing through its servers."