OT: Most clueless ISP award 7464

Michael Heiming

I'll bet a large percentage of their customers don't know about this policy or think it's great. Most consumer-oriented ISPs these days seem to offer some form of spam filtering for their users, over which the users have little or no control. (E.g., Hotmail lets you choose one of three levels of filtering, but that's all the control you have. And I'd bet most users can't even find those settings or don't bother to look for them.)

It seems that average (i.e., non-technical) consumers expect their ISP to handle spam filtering for them and the users are actually happy about the fact that they don't have to do anything. It's just a case of the company responding to the (IMHO misguided) demands of their uneducated users---instead of educating the users about available spam filtering techniques at the client's side. And unfortunately those users outnumber the technically competent ones by at least 10:1.

Plus, in most cases the ISP's customers probably don't realize how much of their e-mail is getting blocked. It's the senders like yourself who see the problem and complain---but you're not a paying customer of the problematic ISP so they can easily ignore your complaint.