The Downside To Spam Filtering

from the blocking-legit-messages dept

About two years ago I had set up another project with a cheap hosting company. I was having uptime problems, so I emailed them from my Techdirt account. The message never got to them (and never bounced either). After multiple tries I finally called them, and they explained that they had set up a spam filter, and they guessed (there was no way for them to check) that the word "dirt" caused the message to get filtered. I told them this was a very stupid policy, and soon took my business elsewhere. It seems that, as more and more people use spam filters, problems like that example are becoming much more prevelant. Many newsletter writers, for instance, have plenty of stories of newsletters bouncing as spam. Since every individual spam filter uses a different set of rules, there's no way a writer can prepare for them. It's not as if there are a list of words to avoid. At this point, it's just a minor annoyance to newsletter writers, but as spam filters get more aggressive it could mean you'll have more and more difficulty just sending a regular message to people you know if it hasn't been scrubbed clean of any possible spam terminology.

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