AOL Decides Emergency Alert Messages Are Spam

from the time-to-tweak-the-filters dept

It seems that these sorts of stories are becoming all to common. Just about everything is getting caught in spam filters at one point or another -- and AOL's spam filters seem to be among the more aggressive in calling just about anything spam. A few years ago they blocked Harvard admissions emails as spam, and now they've blocked timely emergency alert emails as spam. The emails, from a local government in Florida -- designed to warn about hurricanes, tornadoes and other weather emergencies -- apparently did not reach any AOL email users. Of course, with any filtering system, these sorts of problems are bound to happen. The real question is how does the company deal with falsely banned emails. Here, AOL breaks down again. Recently, for example, I discovered that you cannot send emails to anyone on AOL if you're using HotSpotVPN, a popular VPN offering for small companies and individual contractors. With AOL, there appears to be no recourse. The (non)recipients have no option to see the emails that AOL blocked, and the senders have no option to protest and point out that their emails are legit.

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