Jul, 2001 : Verizon Limits Email Addresses to Reduce Spamming

📅 July 6, 2001 - Verizon (verizon.com) announced last week in an email to its Internet subscribers a new policy intended to stop unsolicited commercial emailing, known popularly as spam. The policy will prevent users from sending emails from different domains. However, this has been met by complaints from several of Verizon's customers, who doubt that the policy will be at all helpful, and see it merely as a nuisance.

Of Verizon's 950,000 dial-up and digital-subscriber-line customers, about50,000 use a different domain name from the four that the company provides.This includes users who check mail from multiple accounts and use Verizon'sSMTP servers for outgoing mail. Under the new policy, all such emails willbe rejected, in an attempt to reduce spamming.
The solution for users affected by this policy is to add a "reply to" headerin messages, that will allow most email programs to respond to an alternateaddress. However, the Verizon address will still be displayed in themessage, a procedure which some consider confusing and clunky. Also, someexperts believe that this will do little to prevent most spammers fromabusing the system anyway, provided they have the right software andknow-how. "It would only prevent a very dumb spammer using very dumb tools," John C. Klensin, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board, toldthe Washington Post today. Since there is nothing in the policy to verifyuser IDs, a spammer could simply use a false Verizon address to send outbulk emails.
However, Verizon will soon be taking other steps to control spam, which willput it in line with most other major service providers. The company will beshutting down their "open relay" SMTP servers by next Thursday, whichcurrently allow any online users to send email through them. This isconsidered a fairly standard protocol among Internet providers, and moreeffective than limiting use of separate email addresses, according toseveral experts.