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Electronic Mail (e-mail) is a wonderful communication tool, when it works, but is so easily abused. The result of the abuse is that e-mail Service Providers have created their own tools in an attempt to combat the abuse. For the most part the abuse is defined as excessive e-mail posts or perceived spam and the tools to combat it are "Black-Listing" and "Blocking". Both of these tools can be used on inbound email to the server and if necessary outbound email from the server.

In addition there are a number of e-mail providers who are in effect resellers of a primary Service Providers services. Two examples are pacbell in the USA who are hosted by AT&T and ihug in New Zealand who are hosted by Vodaphone. So the Black-Listing and Blocking can be applied at both levels and on the inbound and / or outbound e-mail services.

In a number of instances UKTS has been classified as an e-mail abuser, BT / Yahoo / BT Internet is a classic example. The major contributor to this situation is the number of e-mails sent from the Forum software where users have set flags to be notified of new posts in a thread they wish to be kept updated on. This has at times resulted in a peak of aound 20,000 e-mails per day leaving our server.

The outcome of this Black-Listing / Blocking is that quite often we don't receive your emails, your Service Provider may have Black-Listed / Blocked outbound e-mails to our server. That results in us never receiving your email. The same applies to inbound e-mail. Your email may have reached us, we have replied but the Black-List / Block is applied to inbound email so our e-mails are "bounced" back to us. With no other way of contacting you, there is nothing we can do to get that e-mail to you.

The final piece of software that Service Providers are using more and more is SpamArrest or similar to cut down the amount of spam racing round the Internet. Unfortunately this software requires manual intervention on the part of the sender and the recipient. UKTS as the sender of automated e-mails about Forum updates never sees the SpamArrest screen with its Captcha (Gotcha) screen, so again our e-mails are blocked.

We have in the past and still do contact Service Providers to be removed from Black-Lists or Blocking as we are made aware of them. End users are advised by their Service Providers if they are using SpamArrest (et al) to set up their configuration to accept certain e-mail addresses. However, it should be noted that the Black-List or Block are the first port of call on any inbound e-mail and if set the e-mail is rejected before it gets to SpamArrest, so even if you have set up SpamArrest to accept our e-mails, the Black-List / Block will stop them first.

What can you do ? You can check with your e-mail Service Provider whether we are Black-Listed or Blocked, if we are then please make contact via a friend to contact us so that we can contact the Service Provider to be removed from the Black-List or the Block removed. Trying to e-mail us may result in us not receiving your e-mail. Check to see if your e-mail Service Provider uses SpamArrest or similar spam blocking software and configure it to accept the atomic-systems.com domain and the uktrainsim.com domain. Lastly some e-mail Service Providers are using the WhiteBook system, if your e-mail Service Provider has this sytem in place then again you should add the atomic-systems.com domain and the uktrainsim.com domain.

One final point is that our requests to e-mail Service Providers to remove us from the Black-List or to lift the Block is not a guaranteed result.

UKTrainSim