Slashdot Mirror
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...
Those mails are probably just "get-safe-quick" schemes anyway. Not surprising the spamfilter snagged 'em...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
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.
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.
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!
SEO Firefox Extension
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! --
Using AOL CAN in fact kill you.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
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
"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."
Basically, email doesn't currently seem a very good method for broadcasting messages to a large number of opt-in recipients.
It needs some system where people configure their client to say what they want to subscribe to, and then let the upstream servers know what to filter for. Perhaps a system where you could post the message to one place and it would be replicated. You could even arrange the "news" into categories so that people could organise it easily, like some sort of "internet news protocol"...
Bet nobody will implement that idea though. Sounds complicated.