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E-gift Certificates = Spam?
vincewazalooski writes "Good read in NY Times Circuits section today about how spam filters at Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. often interpret gift certificates from Amazon et. al. as spam. Worst part is, you might send a gift cert to someone, they never get it and you never know."
My ISP started deleting spam last month, and I lost a lot of important email.
I forward all mail from a domain I own to my primary address at my ISP. Unfortunately, there are open formmail scripts also being hosted on the same machine my domain is hosted on, so all the mail forwarded from my catch-all falls into the SpamCop blacklist. (I've tried to track them down, but no luck... any advice on finding the culprit so I can report them to my hosting co.?)
This wasn't a problem in the past for me, as my ISP was simply putting "X-Spamcop" headers in the mail, which I could filter against. My filter was roughly "If ('X-Spamcop' in header) and (address != '*@mydomain.com') then it's spam."
One day last month, without warning, they started dropping all mail that was on the SpamCop blacklist - no bounce message, nothing.
It took two hours on the phone before I got them to pull the filter off my mailbox. They said it wasn't possible to pull the filter, but I managed to convince them to do it, so I guess it was. I only lost 3 days worth of mail, but it was during an active eBay auction... argh!
Very cute.
Some notes I sent friends about whatever got screened by my own filter (on bcc) as spam because I put a $ in the subject field. Brilliant bayesian filter my eye.
In any case, the gift certificate should REQUIRE the recipient to check in at their site to confirm receipt. If no confirmation is rec'd, the merchant could try again, then notify the sender with the option to void the certificate. This is easier than tabulating receipts yourself because (1) that's work and (2) not everyone says thank-you (hey, I'm catching up!).
You can never be *sure* that your filter(s) are working perfectly.
It's even worse: you *can be sure* that your filters will not work perfectly. So the above is a sound advise: move suspected spam to a junkfolder, and check occasionally.
the pun is mightier than the sword