Tiscali coughs to spam blacklisting after a week without email

'Er...try Hotmail...for another week'

Updated Tiscali has admitted the reason many of its customers have been unable to send outgoing email for over a week is because it has been blacklisted as a spammer.

According to Reg contacts, Tiscali is known in the anti-spam community as slow to act against abuse of its network. In a statement, it said: "We...have been targeted by spammers using our service to send out spam, this in turn has meant other ISPs have taken measures to block mail being sent by Tiscali."

The Italian-owned ISP has still not provided a timeframe for when it will resolve the crisis. Tiscali said: "Our engineers are taking urgent action to block the spammers abusing our email service, this will progressively take effect over the next few days. We will post daily updates on the Service Status page and also within Forums until normal service is resumed."

Tiscali has apologised and advised users cut off by the blacklisting to use a free webmail service. A company representative said a meeting to discuss action was ongoing. ®

Update

Tiscali now says it will complete work at its end to rectify its spammer status this afternoon, but that the changes will take between seven and ten days to take effect, which is unlikely to appease many.