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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."
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
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
You can whitelist most of your coworkers. Not by the address, of course, but by the IP used for sending the mail.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Well I actually live in IRC and though we don't use AOL any more, this shall serve as yet another reason a switch to DSL has merit.
If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
--Kurt Vonnegut
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.
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!)
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.
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).
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.
"Aparently b/c they block all comcast email."
There is a reason for that.
Of the spam that winds up in my filtered folder, on any given day 50-70 percent comes from a Comcast IP address.
If enough Comcast customers would either switch and tell Comcast why or complain about them not locking down there servers (most are configured as open proxies), them maybe Comcast would get off their greeedy asses and do something about it.
Blame Comcast, not AOL.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Trying to educate them is hopeless--I know, I've tried.
No, it's not hopeless. It's hard. Those are not the same things. It takes patience and time to learn something new, and it takes patience and time to teach something. Just because you give up doesn't mean the task is impossible.
Hopefully, technology will get to the point where most users can both not know the details of the computer, and also not manage to mess things up at the same time. I think we're getting there. Slowly.