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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....
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
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."
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! --