Lawyers are Victims of Spam Filtering Services they Hired to Eliminate Email SPAM

This is another event-caused Article Affecting my Lawyer Clients and Lawyers Everywhere!

Blocked Email, Email Bounce-backs, Email Server IP Address is Blacklisted

Lawyers are Victims of Spam Filtering Services they Hired to Eliminate Email SPAM – So your incoming or outgoing emails are being returned, bounced or blocked. What’s going on? Chances are your email server’s IP address is on one or more of some 400+ blacklists. Those blacklists are growing! Those blacklists can affect just “some” of your emails because the sender or receiver of the problem emails subscribe to a SPAM service. There are some firms like Microsoft that subscribe to Norton and all emails to any of Microsoft’s various email services ___@hotmail.com, ___@live.com, and ___@yahoo.com (a Bing company) are all affected and “bounced” back to you. So frigging Frustrating! It may even have been triggered by your SPAM service! Amazingly, that is often the case. Your law firm or business has been harmed and damaged by your own efforts to cut down on the Email SPAM you are receiving!

The American People and their U.S. Lawmakers Over-Reacted to September 11th Attacks

Following the attacks of September 11th 2001, we citizen-sheep allowed and enabled the U.S. government to drastically and irreversibly overreact. We allowed our lawmakers to enact laws that allow the NSA to access all our private email accounts, record our every phone call, collect our cell phone data — even track our daily movements. The nineteen terrorists we allowed to live and train here have been used as boogeymen to convince us scared and vulnerable citizens into allowing our lawmakers to over-compensate by creating huge bureaucracies that now threaten our very way of life.

Aviation and Transportation Security Act – TSA

Two months after the attacks, Congress federalized airport security by passing the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which created the Transportation Security Administration. Prior to 9/11, security had been handled by each airport, which outsourced to private security companies.

The Patriot Act – NSA Unleashed on Citizens and Allies

The Patriot Act may be the most recognizable piece of legislation relating to Sept. 11. More than 130 pieces of 9/11-related legislation were introduced in the 107th Congress in the year after the attacks, with 48 bills and resolutions approved or signed into law. Along with the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, they included the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act. Then there were the “secret” legislation buried in various bills that created the NSA and all the agencies where there is virtually NO MORE PERSONAL PRIVACY. Evaporated in one decade!

Grope Grandma, Ogle our Wive’s & Daughter’s Naked Bodies, Butt-Diddle Hard-Working Lawyers

Homeland Security and TSA are like the SS of Nazi Germany and growing more powerful daily; we put up with the government-empowered thugs at our airports wearing uniforms with TSA logos as they grope our grandmothers travelling to visit us during the holidays; we put up the these perverts ogling our xray-striped wives and daughters’ naked bodies while pleasuring themselves in back rooms. We raise our hands like street criminals and allow the TSA agents to backhandedly grope testicles, lady parts and butt-diddle respectable lawyers who simply want to get on a plane to represent a client or attend a seminar. A decade of this madness has seen our liberties eroded, our freedoms trampled and our enjoyment of living once-free American lives evaporate. We can lay these travesties at the feet of an all-powerful, intrusive nanny state government!

Similarly, Corporate Spam Filtering Companies are Over-Reacting to the “Threat of SPAM” for Profits

In a similar fashion, in 2013 forward we are now being victimized by private sector Corporate Spam Filtering Companies that, like the U.S. Government, are similarly over reacting in search of making a profit! Unfortunately, law firms are the tip of the spear and the one of the primary victims because they are like canaries in the mine shaft. Lawyers are one business segment that is seen as virtual cash cow ATM machines to lots of B-2-B (business-2-business) companies and entrepreneurs who ruthlessly pursue lawyers wanting to hawk their services. If you are an attorney, your phones are melting daily with constant cold calls from marketing people promising you rainbows and unicorns if only you will hear them out about their magnificent Internet marketing magic to bring you new clients and cases. Right?

You are likely here because some of your lawyer emails are being BOUNCED!

Welcome to Lawyer HELL! Here’s what is likely happening. Because you or another lawyer or business owner who has a website on the same server where your website and email account is located, has received way too much email SPAM, as a defensive measure you (or one who shares your server) searched for and subscribed to a personal or Enterprise SPAM Blocking service. You may have shot yourself in the foot! If you or someone in your law practice signed-up for an “Enterprise SPAM Service” and you then install the software on your computers, you may have sawed off the limb you wanted to defend from SPAM! Incredible as this sounds, this may be what just happened to you. That SPAM software you (or other firm on the server) subscribes to, then reports back to the SPAM Filtering service ALL emails that it considers SPAM, or that YOU —in your daily frustration— drag to your SPAM Folder! You are part of a self-defeating circle of injustice. The injustice has just started as these SPAM defense companies will virtually always ignore you or DRAG their heels when you are swept up in their master BLACKLIST and then want to remedy the FUBAR.

   

How Might You Have Shot Yourself in The Foot?

You, as a lawyer, have a CONTACT US FORM on your law firm website. It may or may not have something called a CAPTCHA routine that requires the person or software robot to answer a changing “challenge question” such as: “Which President is on the $1 Bill?” – Some overseas SPAMMERS won’t know without some Google research…

These CAPTCHA challenges – are on your website form because SPAMMERS –mostly from overseas– often use sophisticated robotic software to send endless, overwhelming, INBOX-filling SPAM crap that includes “buy Cialis, cheap Rolex watches” to 1,000’s of websites per hour. The CAPTCHA software does a good job of tamping down these SPAMMY messages from robotic software, but there are slave-labor shops in the Russian Federation and across ASIA and the Middle East that enlists humans to copy and paste SPAM messages into website contact forms, figure out the CAPTCHA challenge and then click “SEND.” The result is a small trickle of SPAMMY content still making it to you from the CAPTCHA-protected contact form that comes to the law firm into one or multiple email accounts. There are domestic web people from YP, Yodle and other high pressure marketing firms that will, if your receptionist blocks their calls, use the your website contact form to get a message to you. That $800 cold call fee inspires SPAM.

You or another frustrated lawyer then drags the spammy Contact Us Form SPAM message to his or her SPAM folder, or your Outlook software program did it for you. The Enterprise SPAM software you subscribed to now registers the sender of this SPAM message as a “SPAMMER” and reports back to the company that the source of the SPAM is IP ADDRESS 12.48.109.158 which just so happens to be the IP Address your website server and email server! This results in a Law Firm Cluster-F*#k or FUBAR.

Clients are being blocked who are attempting to send you vital communications!

The very company you (or some other firm on the your server) hired to filter SPAM has just reported your website server and/or mail server’s IP address as a source of SPAM and you are now on a BLACKLIST!

Self-Inflicted – Circular Firing Squad – You May Have to Threaten Legal Action to Remedy

It will often turn out that the Enterprise SPAM Filtering company you are paying hundreds of dollars per month is the culprit behind your new email issues! They have BLACKLISTED your website server and/or email server! Sweet Jesus – a Circular Firing Squad! Now you will attempt to get your server “White-Listed” or “De-Listed” and find out that the very company that so readily took your money now IGNORES your pleas to remedy your new dilemma.

You will fill out a website form for the “False Positive” from the Blacklist Company that is causing you anguish such as this Proofpoint Dynamic Reputation TEST I filled out last week.

You will then wait the 24-48 hours they suggest will be required and it will invariably turn out that your request is IGNORED, OVERLOOKED, or seemed to vanish into a black hole of blacklist de-list requests. You May Have to Threaten Legal Action to Remedy the situation. Welcome to Lawyer Hell…   Good Luck!

My personal battles? Maybe This Can Help You

Bounce-back emails – usually have your email server’s IP address and the SPAM Filtering Company Name – maybe even a LINK to the website where you can challenge your Email Server being BLACKLISTED as you can see BELOW:

If you don’t have a copy of the bounce-back email, maybe your email server is hosted by the same hosting company that hosts your website such as Godaddy, or BlueHost or HostGator…

Find the IP Address of your Website (if your website hosting company also is your email server)

• Site24x7 – What is the IP address of a website?

After you learn the IP Address of your Website and/or Email Server, you can run it on this Blacklist Tester:

• Mx ToolBox Blacklist Checker – Blacklist Checker

If your IP address in listed here one or more times you have problems.

Call me if you’ve been Damaged by Norton, Proofpoint or another Blacklist Firm

I have a growing list of law firms that want to file suit or have me set up some “flaming” websites to channel the growing frustrations back toward some of these firms that seem to be utterly unresponsive to the damages they inflict on businesses. I had the partner of a 200-lawyer firm with offices in Washington DC, New York, Florida, California and Virginia plead with me to secure the domain: www.ProofpointVictimsClassActionLawsuit.com this very day with the request to build his PI department a new website to solicit other damaged businesses to go after actual damages. As it turned out, Proofpoint finally responded this afternoon after some dozen hours spent peppering their corporate offices Thursday and Friday of last week for relief and remedy.

Two months ago I had a build up of similar seething anger to trash Norton Enterprise Security via social media across the U.S. by several law practices that were BLACKLISTED on another one of my servers. Please share your heart ache stories with me so I can share them with other lawyers here.

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** from a book called Disorder in the Courts Disorder In The Court!