ISPs have been told to improve procedures for reducing unsolicited bulk email (UBE) by the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA).
UBE – or spam as it is more commonly known – is the subject of a new report by ISPA which recommends that its members adopt better practices to deal with spam and educate customers as to how they can stop their PCs being turned into ‘bots’.
“Effective abuse procedures should be in place to make reporting easier. Customers need to be educated on the nature of UBE and how to protect their PCs with firewalls and anti-virus software,” said Jessica Hendrie-Liaño, chair of the ISPA Council.
ISPA is a trade association for companies that provide internet services. It has been around since 1995 and promotes self-regulation within the industry.
One of the proposals is that ISPA members should ensure that all email generated within their own networks can be attributed to a particular customer or system, in order to stop spam at the source.
“ISPs hate spam. It saps valuable bandwidth, can compromise the integrity of a network and affects the performance of mail servers. Combating spam costs ISPs and their customers very significant amounts of time and money,” said Mrs Hendrie-Liaño.
The news comes on the same day as a UK-based company released a solution which it claims is 100 per cent effective against spam.
