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Australia's Largest ISP Redefines Spam

Posted by timothy on from the don't-tell-all-your-friends dept.

cpudney writes "According to this article in NEWS.com.au, Telstra BigPond, Australia's largest ISP will monitor its customers' e-mails and suspend the accounts of users suspected of sending spam, viruses or denial-of-service attacks. Under changes to its Acceptable Use Policy, BigPond will investigate cable and ADSL Internet customers sending more than 20 e-mails in a 10-minute period, and BigPond management "may suspend the (user's) account while the customer is contacted" if they are suspected of sending spam. Previously, BigPond's definition of spam was held to be 400 messages sent over a 15-minute period and now it's changed to 20 e-mails over 10 minutes. Internet Society of Australia president Tony Hill said BigPond's new definition of spam was very restrictive and he was concerned the limit had been set too low for legitimate e-mail users."

2 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. This won't be good for Bigpond customers... by Kulic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    One of my uni lecturers uses Bigpond as his ISP. He also has his uni email accounts redirected to his Bigpond address. He had problems a while ago when Bigpond went down. He normally accepts assignments via email, but everything sent to him got delayed a few days. Thankfully he accepted assignments which had been sent to him on time, otherwise a lot of people would have inconvenienced.

    This lecturer also has other responsibilities (I won't go into detail here) which require him to him to send out newsletters to all of the students in our department, plus international committees and a large number of university staff. We are a small department, but still have ~100 students. Sending out a student newsletter would trip the new email limit. I don't know how he's going to get around this from home (obviously he can send it using our uni mail server when he's at work).

    Just another example of Bigpond not being up to scratch these days. I personally use a competing ISP, and have never had a problem. I don't know how Bigpond is going to keep its customers with shit like this.

    1. Re:This won't be good for Bigpond customers... by wrmrxxx · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I don't know how Bigpond is going to keep its customers with shit like this.

      Telstra has all sorts of ways to try keep their customers. For example, misleading advertisements - they were forced to take some of their TV ads off the air by the ACCC. Or abusing their monopoly on the phone lines by lying about the availability of ADSL - they told a customer he was too far from the exchange when he wanted to get ADSL through another ISP, but was close enough for Bigpond. Then they threatened him when he talked!

      I think there is only so far they can slide, however, before even the most uninformed consumers see the light. Their recent run of email brown outs must have been hard for even the most tolerant of users to ignore. This article at whirpool suggests that people are finally starting to wake up.