Prelude: The best of the commercial spam filters eliminates something like 99% of all spam while getting rid of about 1% of legitimate email. At 60,000 spam attempts per day against just one of our user accounts, this would leave only 600 spams per day for that user if we used a commercial solution. We have therefore chosen the radical measure of rejecting spam to the rate of 99.99%. Those extra 2 9's means that we actually get only 6 successful spams per day per user, give or take. But it is done at a price. The price is that we sometimes reject legitimate emails. We are sincerely sorry about this, and if your email does not get through, read the end of this Web page for details on how to best get through our email spam detection mechanisms.
1) We do not send out spam. If you get spam appearing to be from all.net look at the detailed email headers to confirm that it is actually from somewhere else.
2) We do not want spam, we do not like spam - Sam I am!
3) If we get enough spam attempts from the same place, we start to refuse all mail from that place indicating that they support spam. If it continues we refuse all service to that IP address - typically for 4-6 months - the time between system reboots of the computer that handles our email. We have started remembering the IP addresses of the big offenders so when we come back up we will not bother to figure out that they are spammers again.
4) If you want to send us email and you get spam blocked it likely means that your ISP supports spam - or at least is not adequately skilled to stop sending it toward us. We think that you should choose between getting email through to us and others and keeping service with an incompetent or spamming ISP.
5) You can always send us physical mail. It takes a bit longer and costs a bit more - but we don't block it with technology yet. If your mail is sufficiently appealing we may even communicate with you again some year through email.
6) We reserve the right to hunt down and kill anyone who repeatedly or abusively spams us (something about the insanity plea - or is it self defense?). Or, in lesser cases, we may simple try to disable the infrastructure of the offender, or ... OK - so we really won't do any of these things - but we do think of this often. We may use all legal means to stop the spam.
How to get email through to us: We detect spam in a variety of ways. If your email has a notice indicating that it is not spam, it will be rejected as spam, since spammers are often liars as well and make this claim. If your email has any of the most common spam words of the day, or words you would not use in pleasant company, it may be rejected as well. If your email has advertising at the end, the advertising at the end often triggers the spam detectors - stop using Yahoo! mail or MSN mail or other mail systems that include advertising in your email if you want your email to get through. If your email comes from or includes things about changing the size, shape, or normal operation of body parts, prescription drugs, Nigeria and money, or is sent to an email address you found on our web site, it is more likely to be rejected because these are things spammers seem to like to do a lot. If your email is sent to the same recipient multiple times, or if the same email is sent to multiple recipients at our site, it is more likely to be rejected because spammers seem to think that sending it this way increases their chance of getting it through. The best way to get email to us is to send it from your own account through your ISP (and not through some place like Yahoo! that is, unfortunately, exploited to send spam), use normal words, and say what you mean.
Or... you could call us - our phone number is on the menu bar on the home page of http://all.net/ - near the top - in bold! And we like to actually talk to real people. But please don't use automated calling mechanisms that are the spam of telephone calls. We are on the national don't call list - so unsolicited commercial telephone calls are resented even more than unsolicited commercial emails - on a per call versus per email basis. We block telephone calls using... here we go again!