E-mail from North Rock Communications customers was blocked for hours yesterday after the Internet Service Provider was placed on Spam Cop, a real time Internet blacklist.

Spam Cop is one of a number of blacklists which are designed to filter IP addresses that have have been caught or are suspected of sending out Spam.

Marketing manager Ch? Barker said that North Rock?s monitoring programme actually caught the first single customer computer infected with a Trojan/virus yesterday morning, however when a second computer became infected with the same Trojan/virus, Spam Cop insisted on putting North Rock on its blacklist. As a result, any ISP subscribed to Spam Cop automatically blocked North Rock e-mail from reaching intended recipients.

The majority of yesterday?s customer e-mails were not however lost for good, but simply cued up on the North Rock server. North Rock expected to be delisted from Spam Cop?s blacklist around 7pm last evening which would allow other ISP?s to start accepting e-mail from North Rock again. Recipients of delivery failure notices must however resend their e-mail.

This is the fourth time in two months that North Rock has landed on Spam Cop?s blacklist, however it is hardly the only local ISP to be blacklisted. North Rock actually claims, that as a result of constantly monitoring its network for signs of intrusion on customer computers, it is the least blacklisted ISP on the Island.

Last night, Mr. Barker urged Internet users to practice smart surfing habits, and ensure that their computers have the latest operating system updates, a robust antivirus and firewall programme. Customers can also help ensure that their computers are not sending out personal information without their knowledge by regularly running an anti-spyware programme.

Mr. Barker said that on average 90 percent of e-mail traffic is considered Spam nowadays as hackers and spammers constantly attempt to manipulate and take advantage of normal people over the Internet.

?Spam is a multimillion dollar industry that will continue to be a problem as long as people are using e-mail,? he said adding that computers can get Trojans or viruses begin to spew out mass quantities of spam without the user?s knowledge.

For its part, North Rock Communications will install another spam box on its front end as it moves to add an additional layer to block spam internally and alert the company even more quickly to problem computers.