After a week or more of e-mail woes, Tiscali’s UK customers can once again send e-mail with some confidence that it will arrive. Still, disgruntled Tiscali customers fill the blogs and tech message boards with questions, conspiracy theories, pleas for helpful information and vengeful vows directed at the ISP. This is e-mail, after all, our lifeline with the outside world. Any unexplained disruption is unforgivable.

What prevented Tiscali’s 1.8 million access customers and 4.3 million webmail customers from relying on their e-mail accounts was that rival ISPs were, for a time, labelling all incoming Tiscali mail as spam. In a bluntly worded message, The Spamhaus Project said that this could easily have been avoided had Tiscali heeded repeated warnings that its networks are filled with spam-pumping zombies. Spamhaus counted 19,000 of them. Tiscali disputed the charges, adding: if there are zombies on our network please help us identify them.

But still, blockading the accounts of up to six million customers? Is this a necessary step to rid the world of spam? Worse yet, should all e-mail users come to expect such treatment as the war on spam intensifies? As the most eager anti-spam crusaders would tell you, “hell yes!”

Policing spammers is undertaken by scores of organisations made up of citizen spam fighters, who set up e-mail traps, known as honeypots, to identify suspicious volumes of mail. Having traced the culprits, the anti-spam crusaders put them in an online equivalent of the clink called a block list. Then they share the details with ISPs and e-mail services, which typically respond by blocking all mail coming from these branded spam bandits.

Last week, all British Tiscali accounts were red carded by spam-busters from the Spam and Open-Relay Blocking System, and within hours rival ISPs began blocking all e-mail coming from Tiscali’s servers.

The problem with the shoot-first style of justice practised by spam fighters is that a lot of innocent e-mail customers get caught in the crossfire. It’s hard to say just how many, but Tiscali says that at the peak of the problem it was receiving a few hundred calls an hour from customers wondering why their e-mails weren’t going through.

“No other industry can be clamped in quite the same way as the ISPs,” Matthew Talbot, Tiscali’s managing director of customer operations, says. Imagine if a power plant could be shut down without warning by environmental activists if it was suspected to be polluting, he says by way of comparison. In fact, since ISPs are punished for infringements by their customers, a closer comparison would be environmentalists shutting down a power plant because one of its customers was polluting.

Nobody in the industry thinks blacklists are all bad: they quarantine millions of spam messages daily. But there may be a problem with the keepers of the list. Some blacklists, Mr Talbot says, charge a removal fee of between $50 and $500. This bail system is particularly problematic when spam fighters share their scalps with other blacklists located around the world, leading to a costly and time-consuming hunt for any small business or consumer trying to track down why their mail isn’t getting through.

For Tiscali, the hunt began on May 25, when the company’s technicians added a new spam filter that was initially misprogrammed. The result was that some legitimate e-mails were labelled as spam and quarantined and some obvious spam was belched onto the internet. It took Tiscali engineers about a day to identify their mistake and correct the matter, but by then the damage was done. Seeing an inordinate amount of spam coming from Tiscali e-mail servers, SORBS immediately put Tiscali on its blocklist. Spamhaus, which maintains one of the largest blacklists, known as SBL, later said they would have never done such a thing as it would “have generated enormous ‘false positives’ and would not have been in the interests of SBL users.”

“This certainly aggravated the problem,” Mr Talbot said. Instead of having just a brief, albeit substantial, burst of spam disgorged onto the net, plus some quarantined customer e-mail, Tiscali was relegated into a communications black hole. Its e-mails were blocked by unknown rival ISPs for days. Only after fielding customer calls could they pinpoint exactly who was blocking them. It was still doing tests on its system to see if all the blocks had been lifted.

The blacklist keeper’s itchy trigger finger represents a cure that can be far more damaging than the malady. As Tiscali says, spam has got so out of control that it requires a well coordinated communications effort between anti-spam crusaders, ISPs and ill-equipped end-users. Without such coordination there will be a lot more Tiscali-sized outages. And, a lot of us will be wrongly branded as spammers.

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Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com