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."
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
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.
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?
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?
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?
There is a better solution to your problem.
How about you set your mailbox filter to rely on a header rather than a subject tag? If using spamassassin, filter on "X-Spam-Status: yes" rather than whatever markings happen to be in the subject line. The forward (depending on the mail client) ought not to contain this same header.
This is also good practice to use on mailing lists too. Mailman and the like generally include X-Been-There headers. Filtering on this header instead of the subject line has all kinds of benefits such as personal responses to your postings on the list do not get stuffed into the list's mailbox, etc.
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 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.
You think AOL is bad, try using a large company that outsources their EMail. I set up my brother's web-based company administration. It sends email alerts from his webserver to the appropriate employees as jobs are entered into the website by customers. One day, it just stopped. Why? His ISP, SWBell was blocking his webserver as a spam sender. I called them and got India. I complained to the Indian woman a while and got transferred to another Indian woman. I asked repeatedly how to get a person in the United States. After three days of calls, I got a guy in Texas who claimed there was no spam filter of any kind on SWBell's email server. Sure, right. I argued with him for a while and got him to admit that SWBell outsources their email server to Yahoo. Yahoo!? Who the hell can I call at Yahoo about this? Another few days of calls and I got a technician at Yahoo who said that the webserver was blocked because it sent many similar emails to users at SWBell. No kidding. That is the job of the webserver. The Yahoo tech said it was impossible to remove the block on the server. So, my brother now uses Comcast for his business ISP.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.