"J&KCopeland" wrote in message
...

"Dennis " wrote in message
...
How about an email that contains a virus? Those should be filtered
by an ISP.

Once new virus configurations are well, known, I'm reasonably certain that
some (many, most) ISP's might well do extactly that. But someone,
somewhere
has got to get copies of the infected code, break the code down to locate
and identify exactly the code sequence that's the culprit, and then issue
"definations" of that code sequence, and the administrators have to
download
and install the new "definations". Norton, McAfee and Dr Solomon make a
lot
of money doing exactly that. While this process is going on, a malicious
virus can spread world wide, in a matter of MINUTES.

Yeah, but once they break it down they can program the server
to stop forwarding mail to people. Then even stupid people
who open mail attachments that spread the viruses will be
prevented from perpetuating the virus. This isn't an attempt to
prevent the spread of the virus but rather to prevent the secondary
effects of flooding mail boxes with garbage.

In fact, a good ISP will let individual users configure
their own filters.

Are we talking apples and oranges here? I know of no ISP that will let
end-users anywhere near their news servers. Normally, end-users have
read-only access to the servers, and any filters and/or specific
(anti-spam)
programs are applied by the individual's boxes to incoming mail. (Perhaps
there are ISP's that allow end-users to specifically configure their
individual accounts on the servers, but it sounds like a great way for
someone to screw up their mail and then blame the ISP, and since each user
already has the power to create their own rules under any modern
newsreader,
I don't see where this would actually help much.

Arrgh. It's not rocket science to create a server-based program with
a small client app that let's me set my server email parameters: don't
forward email with viruses, don't forward email with "enlargement"
ads, etc. No one is going near the server. Rules at the newsreader
don't help. An infected machine somewhere is sending me 10 junk
emails an hour. If I shut down my PC the mail piles up at the server.
By the enxt morning my server mailbox is full and who-knows-how-
many legitimate emails have been bounced. *Nothing* in a modern
newsreader will solve this problem. It must be handled at the server.

BTW. The "bandwidth" has
already been "chewed" up by the time the messages reach the server.

Not the bandwidth between the mail server an all the ISP's customers.
Jillions of megabits of crap are flowing cutting down on useful
bandwidth for legitimate purposes.

Look, my personal "Microsoft" worm count is now passing 200, so I'm
completely in tune with the frustration expressed. And I've no doubt that
some ISP administrators are probably manually deleting this incoming
messages off their servers, like crazy.
Good for them!

Mine isn't. They tried to tell me it is something I should do on my
PC. I tried to explain the problem but they don't seem to get it.

Yeah but there's a little problem. When I shut off my computer, the
email backs up on the ISPs mail server. When it gets full, valid
email gets bounced. Overnight is sufficient to clog my mailbox.

Hmmmm. To be tactless, either your ISP allocates an extremely small
amount
of space per user OR you're getting helluva lot of large eMail messages.


Yes, yes, YES! Hundreds of emails overnight. Don't know what
the limit is but I've never had a problem until this crap started
happening this week. Now you get it.

Dennis Vogel