Look out. Sprint now has a policy of 'null routing' packets destined for mail servers from whom they have received a spam complaint. That means that some email destined for your mail server will not get there (no route to host) -- even if you don't get your connectivity from Sprint.

That's right -- we have no business relationship with Sprint whatsoever, and we spent all day talking to angry customers who cannot check their email and cannot ping our mail server. And most of them don't even use Sprint ISP, but their packets traverse the internet and sometimes use Sprint's network.

I hate spammers as much as the next guy, and we shut them down the moment we become aware of them. But this is infuriating.

Sprint responded to our complaint: "You may want to be more selective of who your
customers are and what they are doing off of your network"

Needless to say we are talking to lawyers about this.

Thanks for the heads up. I have received no complaints. How did you determine it was sprint?

Wow! Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Sprint is notorious for allowing spammers on their network. When we had our mail server on sprint ips, we were blackholed because we were in the same block as spam sites - we moved quickly when sprint decided no action was needed. Wow! This is shocking.

After talking to a few customers who could trace only as far as sprint, I went to traceroute.org and started testing. Only a handful were routed through sprint, but anything that did was a dead-end.

Update -- they unblocked us, but are utterly unapologetic and accusatory.

Could you share the number you called and what phone options you went through to get there?

Just so I can have it on speed dial? Thanks

You bet:

800-232-6895 /3
M-F 9am to 4pm EST

The two Sprint employees with whom we have interacted are Eric Armstrong (Operations) and Jason Gardiner (Abuse).