Last year around November, NTL began blocking emails sent by WebFusion, the ISP of St Nicholas' Church, Nottingham. My initial enquiry to NTL via their support web site received only an automated response. I made two telephone calls to their technical support line, the second of which took over 1 hour including hold time.

The next day I received an email response claiming that the emails were blocked because they contained virus attachments. This was not the case - all of the blocked emails were short text messages with no attachments.

I then made an official complaint (ref ON121182) and got a call from Steve (x6359) who told me that NTL have started using the 'SORBS' real-time blacklist to block all email from blacklisted ISPs with the intent of reducing junk email received by NTL customers. WebFusion was on the SORBS blacklist because of a previous customer sending junk emails. I told Steve that the email being blocked was legitimate email that I wanted to receive. He could not help, but gave me another NTL complaints address to write to.

My first letter to this new address received a response (ref 123511) saying that they would not stop using SORBS to filter my incoming email - that is, they would not help me. I wrote back to say that this was unacceptable, and asked for their official complaints procedure and Code of Practise.

I received no reply to this letter and so wrote back a month later asking again. After another 2 months there has still been no response.

My complaint now is two-fold: First that they do not allow me to decide for myself what email sent to me I wish to allow to be received by me, and are blocking legitimate email that I want to receive. Second, they handled my complaint badly: long hold times, fobbing me off with an incorrect reason, stone-walling, and finally ignoring me completely when I asked for the Code of Practise so that I could escalate the complaint.

Further information attached...

Actually, further information not attached, as the web site didn’t give me the option. I assume they will ask for this later.