Monday, July 07, 2008

PacNet / Pacific Internet blocked as spam source

I have been a customer of Pacific Internet for more than 12 years.

Back in the day, their dial-up service was good and relatively inexpensive. I switched to Max Online (Starhub) when broadband cable became available, but continued to subscribe to Pacific Internet because I didn't want to change my email address, and I was still using dial-up roaming when traveling overseas.

Over the past months however, I have had the experience of email being blocked by receivers outside Singapore. The status messages indicated that Pacific Internet was a spam host and no traffic would be accepted.

It is now happening again, and this time I got a definitive response from the overseas ISP:

The outgoing mail server used, smtpgate3.pacific.net.sg, was
blocked by spamrats.com. This means that all of Pacnet's customers using
this outgoing mail server would also be blocked by spamrats.

Pacnet's Email Server Information page,
http://www.pacific.net.sg/customerservice/server/index.htm , indicates you
could use the following outgoing mail server: mail.pacific.net.sg . At
the present time, this mail server isn't blacklisted by spamrats.com as well
as 124 other similar blacklist organizations.

The trouble is that I am using mail.pacific.net.sg as my outgoing mail server. It appears that PacNet is consolidating their outbound traffic on a server that has been blacklisted by pretty much the rest of the Internet world.

With no overall organization in charge of the Internet, individual ISP's have banded together to create blacklists of IP addresses and domains that originate spam. Once included on such a list, you are pretty much unable to get through to anybody else outside your own domain.

Pacific Internet has been bought and combined with Asia Netcom. The resulting company doesn't seem to want individual customers any longer, focusing on business instead. The lack of interest in fixing the problem, and the desultory tech support have led me to finally bite the bullet and move my business elsewhere.

Goodbye Pacific Internet.