P Is For Spam?

from the oops dept

Yet another reminder why you should probably never set your anti-spam programs and filters to simply delete all the spam they detect. Simple mistakes can cause quite a lot of false positives. Trend Micro, the big anti-virus company that's trying to move into the anti-spam space discovered this recently, when an update to their filtering software started declaring that every email that began with the letter "P" was spam. Must have been a lonely time for anyone named Pam, Pete, or Patrick. Update: This article says that it was quarantining any email that had the letter "p" anywhere, and not just as the first letter. They also say this wasn't part of its anti-spam software, and only impacted a small number of clients. They updated the software in about 90 minutes from when the problem was first discovered.

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