ISPA publishes new guidelines to help stamp out spam

Everyone has a part to play in the fight against spammers said the internet industry's leading trade organisation which has published new best practice guidance for internet service providers (ISPs).

The Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) said while ISPs should follow best practice, putting all the responsibility for tackling spam on to them was unrealistic.

It pointed out spam can be as much of a problem for ISPs as it is for consumers. This junk mail overloads ISPs' networks, pushing up their costs and providers often find they bear the brunt of consumer anger as they are seen as not doing enough to block spam from inboxes.

Jessica Hendrie-Liaño, Chair of the ISPA Council said: "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.”

The ISPA  series of recommendations are aimed at showing ISPs how they can best deal with spam.

These best practice guidelines include educating consumers and ensuring that none of their customers is sending spam.

However ISPA said ISPs cannot do it alone. It has called on the Government, law enforcement agencies to play their part in the fight to can spam.

In particular ISPA said there must be effective laws that can be used to stop persistent spammers.

It also said end-users must understand their responsibilities. A recent study shows spammers use zombies - PCs that have been hijacked - to send eight in ten spam emails.

It said consumers should use security software such as firewalls to protect their PCs. This will help to prevent their PCs being hijacked and networked with other compromised computers to mail spam and viruses.