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I came across a problem the other day and was surprised that it’s not more common. It relates to SPAM and the use of broadband for e-mail and Internet at home or small office. Bear with me to the end of this article and I’ll show you how you could be branded as a ‘Spammer’ even though you’ve done nothing wrong.’

You can tell whether you’ve gained a reputation as a Spammer by looking at the rejection messages you’ll start getting. The rejection reason might give you a clue and the error type/number of 550 will usually be quoted. You can check it more thoroughly by looking for bits of the error messages on Google.

Spammers are detected and labelled in one of 2 main ways.

The first is by their e-mail address – especially the second, or ‘domain’ part. This is the bit following the ‘@’ sign. For example, if spam e-mail is reported or detected from an e-mail address with ‘@myaddress.co.uk’ as the second part then mail from nigel@myaddress.co.uk, info@myaddress.co.uk and even.you@myaddress.co.uk is quite likely to be treated as SPAM by the various spam filters on PCs and e-mail machines across the Internet.

The second is by the address from which an e-mail is sent.

All devices, resources, web sites, e-mail senders etc across the whole Internet have their own address, universally recognised by the machines that make up the Internet. It’s called the IP address.

This address takes the form of 4 sets of numbers, each between 0 and 255, separated by a dot ot decimal point. Examples would be 1.1.1.1, 123.96.247.5 and 192.168.1.1.

If you have a broadband connection at your home or small office and it’s from a provider (ISP) like BT, AOL, Virgin, Talk Talk and so on, you’re likely to be assigned one of these addresses on a ‘dynamic’ basis. It’s actually assigned to the ‘router’ where your broadband and phone line comes into the house. The ‘router’ is that small box with flashing lights sitting next to the phone point and powered from the mains. There will be a cable connecting it to your PC – either directly or via other cables across your house (‘network’).

When you switch this ‘router’ it will connect to Virgin, BT etc and ask for one of these network, or IP addresses. This is likely to be supplied to you on a dynamic basis. That means you don’t have a specific address, but rather one is assigned to you from a pool at the time your ‘router’ requests it. This address will be assigned to all devices in the house that use your broadband connection to reach the Internet – for browsing, listening to Internet radio, downloading or e-mail.

And here’s the rub.

If the last person to use that ‘IP address’ you’ve just been assigned happens to have been sending Spam, or otherwise behaving badly with e-mail, you will inherit their reputation!

The good news is that by simply leaving your ‘router’ switched off for an hour or so and back on again, you can regain your clean reputation.

If you don’t suffer power outages regularly and don’t have any other reason to switch your ‘router’ on and off very frequently, you probably won’t see this problem. If you’re paranoid and/or South African you will be switching your ‘router’ on and off frequently and WILL come across this problem sooner or later.