Spam Catchers Block Latest Crypto-Gram

An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier sent out a note about SpamAssassin and possibly other spam filters blocking his excellent Crypto-Gram newsletter. Fortunately you can get it here (early no less!)." Schneier's email reads, in part "Tomorrow I will be sending out the February CRYPTO-GRAM, as I do on the 15th of every month. In the process of creating this month's Crypto-Gram, I discovered that SpamAssassin thinks that this issue is spam, probably because of certain links and descriptions of scams in the text. I have anecdotal evidence that other spam filters block Crypto-Gram as well. ... I'd apologize for the inconvenience, but I'm not sure what I could do to make it less so -- I don't intend to alter my content to accommodate spam filters."

Comments

Re:Finally

[GMC-jimmy]

Why ?

Why newsletters at all?

[PenguinOpus]

I realize its tradition and there's a certain extra bit of personal ownership involved in having a copy of the contents arrive entirely in my mailbox, but... Why do newsletters waste the bandwidth of sending out copies of the content to everyone on the list? A small email with a single link to the contents of the new newsletter would work just as well and only those people that read it would spend the bandwidth. In addition, the author could then scrutinize the logs and see what links and what sections generated interest and perhaps better serve the (sometimes not fully understood) audience.

Free Speech

[Skapare]

Free speech isn't about simply being able to speak something. It's about being able to speak about any topic you choose to. If you want to speak about voting out the incumbent president, or recommending penis enlargers, that should be your right. Infringements on free speech are those that take into account what the speech subject is, to decide whether to suppress it or not. This is the kind of infringement that content filtering does. Perhaps the content filtering is simplistic and looks for "penis" in the message. Or perhaps it is very sophisticated and approaches a conceptual understanding of the message. But regardless of how good it is, by being based on the content, this is infringing against free speech.

Of course for your own mail server, whatever you choose to use is up to you. The US First Amendment only applies to restrictions imposed by the government. But I happen to choose to not restrict based on content; I choose to restrict based on the behaviour of the sender who is sending unsolicited bulk email (UBE) regardless of the content.