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AOL Treats Florida Emergency Alerts Mail As Spam
ScentCone writes "Florida's Indian River County has 4,200 subscribers to their e-mailed emergency alerts, which provide a heads-up on hurricanes, tornados, and other weather events. Subscribers like it, but if they're using AOL mailboxes, those alerts are being treated as spam. All of the subscribers get the mail blast as weather events unfold, and spam pattern detectors are being set off. The county emergency coordinator laments the resulting unreliability of the communication channel, and while few of us at this point think of cross-domain e-mail as reliably mission critical, the AOL-bound portion of a 4200-address blast doesn't seem like much in the spam scheme of things. My experience is that it doesn't take many receivers to mark mail as spam before the domain-wide filters lower some scoring threshold, and the pattern detectors kick in. How many of us run systems that include explicitly voluntary, opt-in e-mail subscription mechanisms which are then reported as spam by the subscribing recipients? This seems increasingly common, and even the whitelisting by smarter recipients doesn't fix it."
Our corporate spam filter (which is administered from Japan, BTW) will discard any email message that has the word 'test' somewhere in its title.
This produces considerable frustration amongst the engineers here, as our location happens to be a test facility....
^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Spam filters not perfect, more to come...
I think this sums up the problem right here; are these people relying on email to keep them updated on potentially life-threatening situations? Don't get me wrong, these messages shouldn't be marked as spam, but depending solely on these email warnings is seriously asking for trouble, considering how many different things can delay these messages or even cause them to disappear completely. Email wasn't designed to be a bulletproof message delivery system.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I used to get filtered out by a few places -- mainly because I send from a Comcast owned IP address, and SPEWS although well intentioned, is monolithic and draconian, and flags ALL comcast IP addresses. I'm not complaining (too much) -- drastic times called for drastic measures. However, since I implemented Domain Keys (and probably more importantly since Yahoo! implemented it) I have not had a "your server is bad" email bounce.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
How can email be reliable for critical information? It can be lost easily, email address can be mispelled, the internet connnection can be down, computer that is checking the emails can be down, recipient can be playing games and didn't see the incoming emails.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I dunno about you, but I'm going to look to a more universal broadcast media (radio, tv) for emergency info, not, "Hey, the sky's looking kinda dark & ominous, I better go check my email."
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Why do people mark messages as spam that they willingly signed up for? Like this email, someone obviously signed up for it because they wanted the weather alerts. So, why mark it as spam when it comes in?
Do they just forget that they really did opt in for the email? Am I missing some other piece of information?
Maybe I'm just overestimating the competence of a typical AOL user.
Those mails are probably just "get-safe-quick" schemes anyway. Not surprising the spamfilter snagged 'em...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
I am on a large number of mailing lists and run a few of my own.
ISP spam filters are a constant headache.
AOL is the biggest PITA of all because either they ignore requests for accomodation from the listowner and the ir subscribers or 'forget' the next time their suystem is updated.
The protocols allowed this since SMTP was first invented, and the MTAs all support it.
But now vendors keep providing these buggy tools that promise email but don't even deliver the email! How can they get away with that.
Please don't mark me a troll. I'm serious - if I sign up for a service, I want it to deliver what I'm buying.
A freak hurricane has struck the AOL offices in Flordia. Officials are baffled as to why the AOL employees had no warning.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
It sometimes takes more than 24 hours for e-mail to travel from my work computer to my colleagues computer. That is about 3 meters away.
Yeah, I sure would like to trust my life on that.
The first time email was demonstrated to AT&T suits, it failed. Using email for critical, time sensitve info is never a good idea unless you have no other option. What we should have is a WeatherBug type service from Gov'ment just for situations like this to save lives.
I use Scan USA and a few other systems for alerts in California. The system itself connects to a couple of the region-wide emergency information networks such as the Amber Alert system, and can sent out information to a variety of sources such as SMS devices, etc. It's still in the early stages.
I do not see them being useful or reliable in a severe emergency like an earthquake, but they may be useful for Amber Alerts, a chemical leak from one of the oil refineries or weather alerts. I also worry if I'll see a message from Big Brother to keep an eye open for "Felon Guy Montag spotted at Spruce and Main streets", but that's another discussion.
Yahoo sometimes marks these messages as Spam, even if the sender is in my addressbook.
I have a couple theories why these messages are marked as Spam:
1. People may sign up with these alert systems and then forget they are on the mailinglists, and mark the email as spam. No surprise here, it happens all the time.
2. Many of these email alert systems don't contain useful content in the email. Instead, they ask you to click on a link to visit a website with more information. See this example from ScanUSA:
Subject: New Alert
SCAN, the Secure Cops Alert Network, has broadcast an alert:
Date Issued: 01.03.2005 12:01:21 PT
Alert Type: OTHER ALERT
Alert Priority: INFORMATIONAL
Click on this link to view the entire alert:
http://www.scanusa.com/viewalert.php?something
That's it. The "Alert" is pretty vague.
In a quick glance, many people may mistake this for Spam because they do not contain much of useful information, which makes it more likely that they will mark the alert as Spam. I get "Stock Alert" spam all the time.
It seems like the email itself should contain the actual Alert, with a hyperlink to the website with more information.
If the emergency email is sent to 50,000 people and everyone clicked at on the link at the same time, the site may die at the same moment when the Alert should be promote as heavily as possible.
When the site comes back up later on, the Alert may have been resolved.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
In most spam-related studies I've seen, business users have consistently stated that losing 1 important email is far more costly than having 1,000 spam emails get through.
I get a lot of spam (usually around 2,000 per day), but I still think some of the measures taken to stop spam are actually worse than the spam itself. I'd rather wade through a few hundred emails that are spam than miss one important one from a client.
Why is the shotgun approach so attractive in fighting spam?
It is time for AOL to fix its spam handling. For years they've blocked me private mail server just b/c I'm on a comcast IP. I've never sent spam and only use it to email my clients and friends, yet I can't get off their list.
Luckly my friends have listened to me and switch their ISP and I have enough clients that I could drop the few AOLer I had. I've added a note on my webpage that we will not correspond with anyone who has an AOL address b/c of AOL's poor spam policy. I'm just a small time freelance person, but I'm educating them one AOLuser at a time.
I'm beginning to see quite a few forums and other places that use e-mail addresses saying things like "Please don't use an AOL address here, enter another e-mail address" and so on. AOL is getting a bad reputation for its handling of mail.
AOL has no problem with blacklisting people willy-nilly, even if they're other ISPs. I only have experience with a few large companies and their mail systems, but all have been blocked by AOL at some time or another for some supposed transgression.
It's high-time that those of us who run web-apps, and the like, took a stand against AOL and banned the use of their e-mail addresses in our systems. They're more trouble than they're worth.
People bitch and moan about AOL blocking things, but they are easy to work with and willing to white list your mailings.
From a whois of aol.com
Technical Contact:
America Online, Inc.
22000 AOL Way
Dulles, VA 20166
US
Tel. 703 265 4670
Email: domains@aol.net
If you are doing mass mailings you need to setup a feedback loop with AOL in order to track the amount of complaints your mailings are generating. If you keep the complaint level below their set thresh hold you will not have problems with AOL, it's really as simple as that.
I am running a web site that gives out process assessments (long story). But after the assessments are set up, we churn out emails to each of the recipients saying "Hey! Your boss wants to to take this test. Click here to take it."
Needless to say, hotmail takes these emails and puts them in the junk mail folder. Lord knows what the other services are doing.
Now this isn't unsolicited email -- people are supposed to get this as part of their job. Are we supposed to give up on email if it involves sending to more than a couple people at a time. I even re-wrote the page to send out emails one-at-a-time: no luck. Still ends up in the spam box.
Seems to me like there's going to be a lot of businesses that have a real need for contacting people (besides sales) that are getting blocked. Anybody have a solution to this mess?
So none of these people have televisions or radios?
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
I've had real problems with AMBER alerts being filtered by SpamAssassin. I sent an email to the guys running the system and life has improved quite a bit. The bigger problem now is the noise that comes from testing the system and false alerts. For example, here in Seattle we got an alert the other day for a kid missing from a military base. It was a simple (if there is such a thing) custodial dispute and the child's life was not in danger, which is a requirement for an AMBER alert. I flamed them for sending the alert, and within 15 minutes the alert was pulled. I'm sure that I didn't singlehandedly change things, but every little bit of pushback helps.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Just a thought.
(The NOAA alerts are all upper case for some reason. I bet the email they send out contains the raw NOAA alert, and that triggers the spam filter all by itself).
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Not all of us have that luxury. Or to be more specific in my case, not all of us have an office who's window actually opens to the outside. My office windows open onto the atrium (UIUC's Digital Computer Lab has been expanded 3 times so far in it's approx 50-60 year life). Occasionally the sun shines in, usually not.
Now, we do have our operations center monitoring an emergency weather alert box and telling people when to head for shelter, but this whole assuming people (in computing, no less) see the sun is kinda odd.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Broken spam filters are a serious problem, but this isn't really the best example of them (the fact that they catch personal, one-to-one email is a much more serious problem and harder to solve).
There are fairly well documented ways to help ensure that your legitimate email is not caught by spam filters at many ISPs. AOLs is one of the oldest and one of the simplest to sign up for. It's free, too.
Indian River County has chosen to A) not sign up for that system themselves and B) send their email themselves rather than using an outsourced provider that is experienced in sending bulk email. According to TFA they're now talking with AOL to fix their issues.
I strongly suspect that they're doing other stupid things in sending their email that make it look just like spam, but without seeing the mail it's impossible to say for sure. If so, though, they really need to talk to decent consultant to fix their mail problems rather than going to the press.
A long while back I used the beta cloudnet anti-spam plugin for when I used outlook. It quickly showed the weakness that what some ppl considered unwanted I did want. Oftentimes it seemed like people must have just been too lazy to unsubscribe from some newsletters that I know were double opt-in only.
End-user voting on spam is just not reliable, certainly no more so than the plain old SA/MIMEDefang setup I use now!
--
Shwa? Why would the puny weather system bother even Floridian Slashdotters? I for one haven't been out of my mother's basement for twenty five years!
The real problem here is not the fact that spam filters aren't 100% perfect and will give false positives occasionally. FWIW, the real problem is not that people subscribe to (opt-in) mailing lists and then mark the messages they get as spam, either.
The REAL problem is that ISPs and Webmail providers use non-user specific spam filters that allow malicious users to perform what is essentially a denial of service attack. Of course, the users in this particular example who flagged the emails as spam are probably just stupid, not malicious, but I at least could just as well imagine spammers signing up for webmail services, sending each other spam and flagging it as valid email, for example, in an effort to "teach" the spam filter that it's not really spam after all.
The only real solution would be to move to a per-user filter configuration, but it's not clear to me how practical that would be. You could use a bayesian filter with automatic learning that also gets updated when the user reports false positives/negatives, and initially use another system (like SpamAssassin) until the filter is fully trained; but it's not clear what the computing costs of that really are (not to mention diskspace requirements for the token databases).
Considering the fact that signing up for these web-based services is usually free, I think that we will see more of this in the future.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
It's interesting. When someone signs up for something, they just decide to click the button to receive it.
When they want to un-subscribe (from a legitimate source) they use the tools provided to them to get rid of it as easily as they can.
Perhaps it's because the computer industry as a whole preaches to them "You'll never be unsubscribed from ANYTHING, by following the directions."
So they hit the "Mark as spam" button and go on with life - the minor annoyance is gone and they can browse their porn uninterupted..
= Grow a brain...
This is a good demonstration of how spammers are messing things up for everyone. A handful of short-sighted and greedy individuals have turned email into a near-useless medium for many legitimate purposes.
But on the bright side, I hear a lot of the biggest spammers live in Florida? Great. Come the next hurricane season, I hope they all miss something important.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Case in point, I've spent days trying to get unsubscribed to the newsletters that come from OSDN.
However because I've forgotten the password I used, and because for some reason my attempts to reset it have always failed, I've resorted to sorting anything I receive from that domain into the trash.
You have an imaginary friend!
I'm surprised some enterprising sort hasn't created a blacklist for use by mailing list operators that tracks the likelihood of a domain's customers illegitimately reporting valid mail as spam. Then, newsletter admins could use that score as a guideline to how many hoops a would-be subscriber has to jump through before getting added to the list.
Coming in from a private domain that's never mis-reported ham as spam? Your reply to the confirmation email is enough to subscribe you. Signing up from moron.com with a mis-reporting likelihood of 35%? You can't subscribe until your mailserver admins have also acknowledged a confirmation message explaining what you're asking for and that you've already explicitly asked to do it.
Hmmm, I've been looking for a new project to start...
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I work for a company that emails its clients once a month, of which a double digit percentage are AOL users.
Everything you need to know about getting your emails accepted by AOL is available at their Postmaster@AOL site.
Basically you need to have SPF records setup, clearly defined unsubscribe links and subjects, and preventative measures so you don't keep re-emailing bad AOL addresses. It's a pain to get on the list, but once you're on things go smoothly.
The problem here is laziness. So many of us, me included, rather than just unsubscribing from opt-in lists, hit the junk button in our mail client. On my mac that's harmless. When an AOL user does it and the client reports home, it causes chaos. And it takes *forver* to get off these lists. I run a mail forwarding service for some local companies, Yahoo decided I was sending SPAM (I wasn't, but SPAM was being sent to the people I was forwarding mail for). I had to fill in the same form describing my "mailing list policy" three times, each time explaining I don't have a list and therefore don't need a policy..... Current anti spam systems are self defeating. We need something better. SPS is NOT it - http://www.spfsucks.com/ - Domain Keys is better, but really I think we need something better than SMTP. My suggested way forward would be that to be accepted by an e-mail system the mail *must* be signed with the identity of the sender, and their public key listed with a CA. Then before your server accepted the mail you could verify the sender, and SPAMmers could have their certs revoked quite quickly. Would probbaly need to be a government organisaiton though - don't want veriswine doing it.
SEO Firefox Extension
Now spammers will use those headers to deliver to everyone in Forida.
... it's become only an "entertainment" medium, and should be treated only as such. Anybody who thinks that Internet email can be depended upon for vital communications has their head way up their ass.
Sounds like an error, perhaps you should file a bug report?
I always mod up spelling trolls.
That e-mail shouldn't be relied upon for mission-critical anything . These people wouldn't receive the weather emergencies if they weren't at their computer anyway, so it's not something that should be relied upon for immediate communication.
It also goes to show that heuristic and other such spam filters are a really terrible idea. I've had more problems than not with spam filters, so I just keep them shut off on my public accounts nowadays.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Found this out in testing. We send messages to students enrolled in our program. I was initially bccing a large list. But places like Hotmail and Yahoo were marking them as spam.
My solution was to simply loop through the list of email addresses and send each student an individual message. A little more resource intensive, but since the messages are occassionally important for their their coursework(as opposed to the occassional "cookies in the lounge" type messages) we couldn't afford to have any messages marked as spam.
Having AOL subscribers not get tornado/hurricane warnings while they're surfing the Net instead of looking out their window or listening to the radio seems to me to just be Darwinian action.
... and icy extremities.
A way for the population to remove AOL subscribers from the gene pool, if you will.
Nature is a harsh mistress and hogs the bedcovers - plus she's got global warming
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This was my first thought when I saw this article (and reading between the lines, it seems to be trying to provoke a predictable response at an easy target, namely AOL). Admittedly whitelisting should work though.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
It bears remembering here that spam filters are not really the problem.
The problem is the spammers.
Kill the spammers (yes, I do mean that, I'm not using that term as a shorthand for denying their bandwidth access) and all the problems with the spam filters will solve themselves.
Spamming is not a free speech issue. It's an issue of people stealing huge amounts of a public good (bandwidth access) for their own private gain.
Spamming is similar to the Islamic and Jewish prohibition against eating pork. This restriction came about not because some God in the sky cursed this one animal, but because pork tastes so good that everyone would want to grow pigs for meat. But pig-raising takes an enormous amount of water and that is the most precious commodity in the desert. Simple commercial restrictions didn't work as the rich would always find ways to overuse supplies of water for pig raising and leave the poor to die from lack of water. The only way to protect this valuable public resource from being overconsumed only for the benefit of a few was to issue a complete prohibition of pig raising and to do it in a religious context. People won't raise pigs secretly when they believe that they will go to hell forever as a result of doing it. The restriction remains even in regions with vast water resources as a symbolic diet restriction used to demonstrate a believer's religious conviction.
So too must we restrict spamming as something that is just not done, and spare no effort to go after the people that do it. It's necessary to be unreasonable about this because it's the only way to protect our resource of limited bandwidth (and by extension, limited attention span).
Then don't buy from AOL.
... you just have to decide what the price is that you're willing to pay)
They make their Terms of Service available, and if it's not something that you accept, then don't buy service from them. Odds are, there's something in there that specifically states that they are not required to deliver every e-mail to you.
There are many people that simply do not want spam filtering (yes, this might seem odd to people out there, but if the cost of a false positive results in the loss of a large business contract, your cost of one lost legitimate message may outweigh a thosand spam messages that you didn't have to look through.)
My suggestion is to find some other provider. If you don't like how something's being handled, vote with your wallet. Odds are, you'll find someone out there whose service offerings better match with what your needs are. (you might have to run your own mail server to get it these days, but everything's avaliable for a price
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I recently had my own OSS spam filter catch a wedding announcement of a friend from college because even though several recipients were in my contact list, many were not.
Too bad we cannot answer our phones, our US mailboxes, or even check email without constant threat of unsolicited advertisement or identity theft.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Using AOL CAN in fact kill you.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
http://postmaster.aol.com/
:)
Talk to them about getting whitelisted. Since it's a government service (Indian River County) they should have little problems getting AOL to permanently whitelist the originating IP address.
Maybe they'll learn this time.
Oh come on! This is news? An organization is sending out a valid and useful message to a list of subscribers, and some of them have an ISP spam filter that misclassifies it as spam? So we jump on the company providing the filter as if this was intentional or policy?
Wake up, false positives for spam filters are not news, and it's disingenuous to have a headline that implies "ooh, look what the evil AOL is doing now..." Bah, FUD.
who surf while intoxik..intoxicatited...oh....fushh it!
AOL is just using spam as an excuse to try to return to its original business model.
And that would accelerate it's downfall, if Grandmas can't get email from their technologically experienced family that doesn't use AOL, what's the point of AOL then?
Trying to communicate legitimately with mass e-mail is sort of like trying to talk to someone at a rock concert. Your lucky if they receive even one word of it.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
I just realized that spam filtering has been blocking my subscription to California emergency incident reports. I've been missing weather and power warnings.
Problem was that the pager went off altogether too frequently, and my friend didn't care if there was a storm cell in -say- Flagler County, a hundred miles to the northeast. So he tried to unsubscribe, again and again and again... and those damned alerts just kept on comin'.
The list was really easy to get onto, but impossible to opt out of. My friend eventually had to change pagers to lose the things.
Moral: sometimes those broadcasts are solicited email that are no longer welcome, and there is no way to unsubscribe. I'd call that "spam": no-longer-solicited bulk email.
I've been saying this now for years.
We should integrate spam filtering and public key signatures in both email clients and in the mailing list servers.
Make the sign up for a list part of the client's actions -- and include information about your public key -- and put a header on "verified" mailing list subscriptions that your mail client will recognize and keep (some cross of email content / hash/ and signature).
The process should all be done under some RFC so that it's TRANSPARENT to the user.
The assumption that my ISP can decide for me what I want to see is rather absurd.
Here's a good method for using e-mail that may help people prepare days in advance for emergency updates.
First, have emergency agencies set up and maintain web pages with up-to-the minute emergency information.
Next, as bad weather or an emergency approaches, send out a single e-mail notifying subscribers about the the web pages with up-to-date emergency information and their URLs. Also urge people in the e-mail to purchase a radio if they do not already own one.
Optionally, broadcast the web page information over the radio.
Simple, huh?
People forget that large ISPs serve hundreds of mass mailers providing "emergency update" and they all want immediate access to their subscribers. Doing so would kill any ISPs mail servers.
At least in this decade, asking ISP to change their anti-spam/anti-abuse policies to allow emergency messages will be about as useful as asking the US Postal Office to deliver my soon to be late tax payments to the IRS five minutes after I drop it off in the mailbox.
Don't whine when someone sets up a critical delivery service using an inadequate medium.
You must not value your time much. First off, I run a high volume mailing list/newsgroup/webforum that has been in operation since 1996. AOL is continually a problem, but nothing like recenetly
As of two weeks ago, all AOL and Compuserve subscribers were removed and the mailing list shut down to those domains.
1) They are not 'easy' to work with. My emails to 'postmaster' went unanswered despite their website saying it was a valid method.
2) Their 'feedback' loops, once you sign up, forwards to you the email that one of their users reported as SPAM. (never mind this is an opt-in w/ confirmation list). AOL strips the 'To' address so you do not know who to contact. It makes the feedback look useless for a mailing list. I have to spend a day or two configuring VERP to figure out who it was.
3) My entire domain got blocked because one AOL user hit 'Report this email as SPAM' a dozen times. It took 3 calls and 3 hours on the phone to resolve.
4) They do offer a 'whitelist'. However to sign up for the whitelist you must agree to their guidelines. http://postmaster.aol.com/tools/whitelist_guides.h tml
What BS is this? They want me to guarantee that my mailing list meets the AOL T&C?
'Any e-mail sent to AOL members must conform to AOL's Community Guidelines http://legal.web.aol.com/aol/aolpol/comguide.html'
5) The whitelist states that every email should have a physical address and contact phone number for unsubscribing. More BS.
'All subscription based e-mail must have valid, non-electronic, contact information for the sending organization in the text of each e-mail including phone number and a physical mailing address.'
They are currently content filtering emails too. Any member of my mailing list two posts a message containing a link to 'angelfire' or 'hotfire' domains are bounced. Entire digets are bounced because a users signature contains their angelfire homepage. I tried to modify the mailing list so that 'http://' was stripped, but AOL still rejected it. Some emails that only contained 'alturl.com' (kinda like tinyurl.com) are bounced.
I was once the administrator for a mass mail server that deals with the military and The Military Officers Association of America, and they had a newsletter that went out on friday, on which action would be taken on monday. I would say 80% of the addresses were aol, and 40% of the time i worked as such, our domain was blacklisted (even though we were whitelisted). AOL is a pain, maybe we should consider some other form of intelligence deciding which e-mails are spam and which are mission critical.
to lobster, shrimp, and shell fish, but did not know that pork was forbidden for the same reason.
shalom and salama lakem
I really believe this is the fault of the email senders. The spamassassin on my email host filters all Amber Alerts, too. The person who sent the mail should have already made arrangements to get the email through to the proper people.
The article doesn't mention it but what are the chances that the email sender is using a well-known SPAM tool, or a well-known SPAM tactic?
Kriston
i turned off the option 'block spam'. I have nice filters that *i* control. Not somebody else deciding for me what i will or won't see.
Mass mailing should be replaced with RSS feeds and rss feed readers in all email clients.
saves potential bandwidth ( c'mon, who actually reads all the email subscriptions)
plus it doesnt clog down mailservers
I get quite a bit of spam that I probably did opt in for 5 or 10 years ago. Unfortuantely some of if requires that you send an unsubscribe message FROM the email address that they sent the spam too.
My of my 'legacy' email addresses forward to my inbox and i cant easily send email from them. Obviously I could change my mailer to set an appropriate from address - but it's easier just to mark it as spam.
Aha. Spam filters might incorrectly classify some emails. Yes, even important ones! ...nothing to see here
Here is how to deal with SPAM:
1 Get an webmail address with a SPAM filter that lets you see your SPAM messages before deleting them (or use a pop account and email client)
2 Go in to your SPAM folder once a day (or less) and skim the list for legitimate emails
3 If SPAM folder contains more than 50 messages a day, get a new account and stop giving out your email all of the time!
4 Clear out the SPAM
5 GOTO Line 2
If you need help with 1, send me some faux-SPAM and I'll find your email and send you a gmail invite. When people rely on a computer to know what they want to read, it is inevitable that the machine will delete a legitimate email. Whitelists take more effort to maintain than the simple procedure above.
Here's a typical Florida alert email. We at AOL highlighted the words that tripped our email filter:
Dear Valued Florida Alert System Customer,
Please be advised that a cyclone developing over the Atlantic can MAKE A HUGE WAVE IN A VERY SHORT TIME!
This information is credited to Dr. Adewale Ngurubo, head of Nigeria's Natural Disaster Catastrophes department. We estimates potential damages to run up to 419 million dollars. THIS IS A SERIOUS WARNING!
[If you wish to be taken off the list, please click here]
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I run a small list for my cycling team. Today things started to bounce: http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554hvub1.htm l
No idea what is triggering THAT one.
.. hurricane strikes!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
The county emergency coordinator laments the resulting unreliability of the communication channel
The county emergency coordinator must be new here (to the Internet/email).
What do their alerts look like? Short blurbs with one or more URLs included, or something more like a short press release followed by pertinent weather stats, and then a URL or two? The former is much more likely to be tagged as spam, even without the alleged problem of subscribers marking these alerts as spam.
eskwayrd = m^2c^4
Florida is where many (if not most) of the USA-based spammers seem to operate, and also in Florida, the spam has made email unusable.
I still have an account or two that get no spam at all, and those are really much more useful, since any mail that arrives in them, actually means something, instead of being just some fallout from some uncaring sociopath.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I was quite amused to see the latest MSDN newsletter from Microsoft filtered into my Hotmail account's junk mail box.
Hurricane Lisa is expected to make the landfall in 48 hours. You too can get away on a luxury cruise using our last-minute reservation. Also, take adavantage of our 60% Viagra discount and stock up before the likely power outage.
Seriously, everybody here in Florida in hurricane season is watching the NOAA page for last updates, and all TV and radio stations have continuous coverage - it is actualy very difficult to escape the hurricane latest news. I would not worry about the e-mail alerts.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
If people used shotguns on spammers, it will reduce spam.
Fight Spammers!
MOD PARENT UP!
AOL blacklists by ip address of the server sending the mail whenever some number of aol users who subscribe to the mailing list hit the "report as spam" button on their email client.
For legit mailing lists you wouldn't think this would happen, but an unbelievable number of aol users treat the "report spam" button as if it were the "trash" button.
To get unblocked by AOL you have to set up an account at which you will receive a request to unsubscribe from each user that uses the "report as spam" button. You then have to parse AOL's format and remove the user from your mailing list. AOL won't even let you contact the user with another "are you sure" type of email.
--Convert Exchange Rates
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
This is old news to anyone who has ever operated a mailing list with a nontrivial number of AOL subscribers.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
AOL is right to assume some hoakey server is a spambot. It is easy to use a free, reliable, well known group remailer that AOL will already have on its white list.
http://groups.google.com/ or http://egroups.com/
are easy and reliable and conveneient.
Yes, that is what I did. However, this is very inefficient. Normally when you run a mailing list the same messages gets sent in one 'smtp' exchange with a mail server. Think of sending the same message to 50 recipients. Only one copy of the message is needed and you tell the AOL SMTP server the 50 recipients. Once you start having to 'personalize' each message, that one message needs to be sent 50 times to each recipients. A waste of time and bandwidth.
I use a number of email lists for school groups and I know that everytime I sign up for one there are usually disclaimers telling me to check my spam for messages the first time an email is sent out and than mark it as not spam. I'm not familiar with AOL, is their system different?
EOM
4200 AOL users not being warned of an incoming hurricane isn't a glitch. It's natural selection.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
.... are likely the same people in the trailer parks that always get het by these things anyways. So there's no great loss to the universe.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
People who post to slashdot because something didn't work out the way they hoped, or some organization, corporation or agency made a misstep. Rather than contacting them and asking for assistance, they go whine to the /. community...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
We at Netsurfer Digest have been fighting this problem for years, not only with AOL, but with similarly clueless ISPs. We're a subscription-based e-zine, and have been for 11 years.
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
When we subscribe to mailing lists like the one described in the story, users should be prompted to enter a non spam phrase, something like a public password. So if an email is thought to be spam, just before being sent to the spam bin, the email is checked for the phrase, if the return is true, it sends it to the inbox. For example, my phrase is: "Check slashdot daily for news of wild running horses." If the phrase exists word for word in the body of the email, it's recognized as legitimate email.
You do realize that you're using their servers? They have the right to do what they're doing. What's wrong with following those guidelines? What's wrong with identifying yourself as the list maintainer?
Just a thought...
There is plenty wrong with their guidelines (and their censorship as the op noted)
Maybe because all the members of your list who have AOL didn't conciously want to adhere to the AOL community stds - which are a joke in the first place since AOL is alive today (and was able to buy TW) because of all their weird and sleezy "adult" chatrooms - they just like to pretend that they don't and never did exist. And its the customer's servers anyway.
Do people on a "confirmed opt-in" list really need a physical address where they can write to get off the list? I am on 25+ tech lists and have no idea where any are - LVS, OpenBSD, djbdns, mon, FullDisclosure, IBM Alpha Works, Bruce's Security Rants, etc, etc - no one cares about physical addresses for crap that isn't spam - legit mailing lists aren't spam and yet AOL treats them like spam if one idiot hits the spam button.
I work for the University of Florida's Open Systems Group http://open-systems.ufl.edu/ which manages the email system used by 49,000 student + faculty among other services. AOL treats any mail from *.ufl.edu as spam simply because they receive so much mail from our domain, mainly due to numerous students forwarding their email to their AOL account. Our university and many others have been trying unsuccessfully to convince AOL to create a whitelist (or use SpamAssassin) for educational institutions and other legitimate sources but have been forced to discontinue email forwarding for students. This is a case of maladroit administrative policies so I would not use AOL as a basis for generalization.
1) You do realize that I am not an AOL customer? Why would I be governed by their Terms and Conditions? It is their members who subscribed to my mailing list so they have to worry about that, not me. I am just delivering mailing that they subscribed to and confirmed with an opt-in procedure that they wanted.
What's wrong with following those guidelines?
The problem with following the guidelines is that as a mailing list I do not have editorial control over what people post to the list. I do not censor the list to insure that it meets AOL community standards. That is not my job or the nature of a non-moderated mailing list.
What's wrong with identifying yourself as the list maintainer?
That depends what you mean. Every email has an RFC compliant 'list-unsubscribe' header. There is a contact us form on the web domain. As far as my physical address, thats really not anyones business. The last thing I need is some deranged user showing up at my house because of something someone said to them on a mailing list.
I thought I was reading the latest Al Zaqawri tirade again, until I saw that you were talking about SPAM, instead of innocent westerners.
Spamming is not a free speech issue, of course its not. Its tresspassing (I believe there have been cases where tresspass law has been used) as well as any other law that deals with spam. Yatta yatta, you have no rights to access a private computer, etc.
However, there are always a few irrational people who want to respond to the spam problem with something equivalent to that of a "jihad" of that of extremist terrorists.
Spammers deserve fines and maybe even jail time. How do you possible justify murder? You can't.
Bandwidth is not a public resource, its a capital resource. You buy it or make more of it. It is not something that is "all around us" (like air or water) or something that more of cannot be made easily. It is also not something that only the government can reasonably provide (roads, medical services, etc).
I'll arm to fight irrational people like you before I give a damn about some penis enlargement spam. People like you in power would bring about fascistic and tyrannical society. That is a danger far, far worse than spam.
My companies filters frequently bounce messages from mail reflectors as spam. Even after I have put the reflector on my white list.
The most amusing case I came across was when I sent an email to a friend warning him that someone had posted a message with a bunch of porn site links to his BBS - his filters pinged it for "innapropriate content".
(I know - I should have spe113d it pr0n)
I run some mailing lists for earthquake information. We have something like 70,000 subscribers worldwide, and I regularly get complaints from people who have had their mail filtered by their ISP as suspected spam. So this is not an isolated problem.
Hey!!! the parentheses are good for something
I recognize that many/most Slashdotters automatically deduct 50 pts from my perceived IQ when I mention my AOL account -- I guess excellent Karma doesn't compensate -- so if you're one of those, you can tune out the rest of this.
Obviously AOL's spam filter is too aggressive, but it does work. (I get maybe 4-6 spams a day, which must compare favorably to Cmdr Taco.) The problems are, you can't permanently whitelist a single sender without turning your entire inbox whitelist-only, and the filter is damn near untrainable. I've been telling it my invitation-only industry mailing list is okay for, what is it, five years now. Hasn't learned yet.
AOL experimented briefly with a different, user-trainable e-mail client called, I think, Communicator. (It wasn't just a rebranded Netscape Communicator.) Trouble was, it sucked down every single e-mail onto your hard drive before you could start training it, including viruses. Yeah, thanks.
I keep my AOL account because it's been my professional front for 15 years, and because my wife's family is on the account too. Vendor lock-in sucks.
If all the dumb users go to AOL, and AOL doesn't let the dumb users get email, how am I supposed to target the people most likely to buy my stuff?
paintball
Emergency communication is a big problem beyond the brittleness of useful services like Indian River County's e-mail. While it's good to see renewed federal and state spending on something as basic as making sure the population knows what to do in a crisis, there's considerable misdirected effort.
After 9/11, a lot of federal money flowed into the states for emergency/bioterror preparedness. Some states have focused on systemic planning and others on broad media campaigns designed to "generate awareness," a vague term that translates too often into ominous billboards and bullet-point brochures.
When I worked with the Commonwealth of Kentucky on their planning in this area, some of the themes emerged that have turned up in other states as well:
- The press, all media bashing aside, is significantly more trusted than the government when it comes to transmitting information in an emergency. But an audit of reporters and editors in Kentucky showed very, very little knowledge of the state's emergency preparedness plans or, indeed who reporters should turn to for information in time of a public-health emergency. Kentucky analyzed the media audit and subsequently set up media workshops across the state that trained reporters in the details of emergency preparedness, types of emergency scenarios, etc.
- Groups falling under the heading of "special-needs populations" -- those who have language barriers or disabilities, as well as those who are very poor and/or cut off (by choice or circumstance) from most mainstream communications channels -- turn to their own for information in times of public crisis. The reality for government is that a lot of the pre- emergency awareness building (as well as the more important communications required in an actual emergency) misses the most at-risk populations unless the effort is made to create a lot of secondary, direct communications channels to these groups.
Bottom line: Public officials like media campaigns because they're visible and make it look like "we're doing something." But, just as with a lot of the efforts currently thrown at security, the appearance action is a long way from real effectiveness."It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
http://james.apache.org/
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
"Goodbye!"
If the company is real, a local TV station sounds real, then you should just phone them up and ask them to stop sending the mail to you. Whenever I've struck this problem, actually phoning the people up and talking directly to the person responsible or the tech staff resolves it, whereas sending unsubscribe request, after unsubscribe request hasn't worked at all. Obviously YMMV but these people usually haven't got anything to gain by continuing to send the stuff and are completely clueless that there is a problem, and once asked they'll stop it straight away.
...the message said:
"It's gonna be a long blow, folks, and you may need to remortgage after the damage. This message was brought to you VIA GRA (GREYHOUND RACING ASSOCIATION of America)".
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
I am an audio engineer who does sound at many many rock concerts. The best way to talk to someone next to you with high sound pressure levels (SPL) is to get about 1 to 2 inches away, have them put their finger in their ears, and speak in a very low voice.
This reduces the high frequencies going into their ear canal which allows them to focus on the lower ones thus increasing your intelligibility level.
This keeps you from having to yell, and also keeps them from having to hear you yell thus raising the localized SPL which is inherently bad for your ears.
Libertas in infinitum
For historical reasons. They go out over teletypes which have no lower case.
Best Slashdot Co
Amber Alerts are not useful. They have never helped the authorities save a person. They have raised the ratings of that chubby blonde chick on Fox News, which is their purpose.
I know you're tracking my posts via my message list. I suggest you read this before you continue posting personal information.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
(and yeah, I do run my own mailserver)
A company I worked for was blacklisted for emailing invoices... Good job AOHell... I have close to 100 clients that were happy receiving their invoices by email, and now am fighting to get off the blacklist so that I don't have to snail mail the invoices (at a cost of $0.50/letter!)