Leader: Telewest, how did it come to this?

Neither side involved in the blacklisting of almost one million Telewest users has covered itself in glory.

The Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) has been accused of using a bulldozer to crack a nut. By blocking all Telewest IP addresses the anti-spam group has certainly blocked the guilty parties. But with those believed to number just 17,000 addresses it means there are around 900,000 innocent IP addresses on that list which are unable to send email to addresses whose own spam controls reference the SPEWS blacklist.

However, whatever the issues with blacklists, it goes without saying that one million pissed off customers is a strong catalyst for effecting change. And Telewest is working on that change right now.

Telewest may be right in calling the actions of SPEWS "heavy-handed" but it certainly highlights the need for ISPs to take greater action.

And there is not really any getting away from the fact Telewest has been incredibly remiss in monitoring the traffic which has been leaving its network.

It is frankly absurd that Telewest has been sending more email than AOL and that this is a situation which was allowed to go on to the point when SPEWS thought it essential to get involved. Telewest can't have thought it plausible that home broadband users on its blueyonder.co.uk addresses were sending hundreds of thousands of emails each day.

At some point those charged with monitoring such traffic must have noticed these figures.

Senderbase.org certainly had, as exposed on silicon.com last month.

It's even more incredible to consider that the bulk of this email was being generated by just 17,000 IP addresses.

It keeps coming back to that number.

SPEWS is wrong to blacklist the other 900,000 or so machines but Telewest is even more culpable for allowing those 17,000 to operate unchecked for any length of time.