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."

Comments

Spam filters are fun...

[TripMaster Monkey]

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....

^_^

Re:Spam filters are fun...

[nizo]

My favorite behaviour is when someone forwards me a message marked as spam by our filter that shouldn't be marked as such. They always leave the [SPAM] in the subject, so of course the message always gets stuffed into MY spam folder where it sits until I decide to go clear it out. The solution to this of course was to create a mail alias (notspam) that doesn't get filtered for them to forward the email to, but of course no one ever uses it.

Spam filtering

[FlyByPC]

Those mails are probably just "get-safe-quick" schemes anyway. Not surprising the spamfilter snagged 'em...

In other news,

[DJCacophony]

A freak hurricane has struck the AOL offices in Flordia. Officials are baffled as to why the AOL employees had no warning.

Hey guys, this might help:

[lheal]

1. TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK!!!
2. Don't include the sponsored link to vi@gra.com.
3. Start the mail off with something other than

   Dear Sir:
   I am the son of a wealthy Zwahalian chief here in Nigeria, and we have need of your assistance....

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).

All Three of Them

[flood6]

This seems increasingly common, and even the whitelisting by smarter recipients doesn't fix it.

...smart AOL users...?

Darwin in Action

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

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 ... and icy extremities.

AOL Kills

[captain_craptacular]

Using AOL CAN in fact kill you.