Spam

In the last year or so this has become a serious problem, and traditional countermeasures (centrally maintained blacklists of known spammers) no longer work effectively. It has become so bad that emails are no longer a reliable means of communication because automated spam detection measures are not 100% reliable, and it isn't practical to manually check the thousands of spam emails that remain.

We are therefore implementing a "strict whitelist" system:

If you have never emailed us before, you will receive an email (a verification request) back which asks you to REPLY to it. The contents of your reply is irrelevant. All you need to do is press the REPLY button in your email program. This will place you on our whitelist, permanently. Your original email will also be forwarded to us immediately.

The whitelist has been preloaded with everyone who has written to us since we started using email in 1994, and anyone we email also gets automatically added, so customers and suppliers already emailing us should not see anything.

If you do not reply to the verification request within 2 weeks, your original email will be discarded.

This system should ensure 100% reliable email delivery. We appreciate your co-operation.

System administrators: The one known issue with this system is that if your email software is configured to ignore the Reply-To: header and replies to the From: header instead, it won't work. Very few email programs are capable of being thus configured, however. If, having replied to the authentication request from the server, you get another one asking you the same thing, that's because your email program is ignoring the Reply-To header.

KK Systems Ltd

8th June 2007