Are Spam Blockers Too Strict?

Myrte writes "Wired.com has a long piece on whether spam blockers are blocking wanted messages." From the article: "For years, e-mail users complained that torrents of unwanted messages clogged their inboxes and crimped their productivity. Now, e-mail users, marketers and mailing list operators are more worried that spam filters are blocking out too many wanted messages. AOL isn't the only company to face charges that it improperly blocks legitimate messages. But, as the world's largest ISP for years, it has long borne the brunt of complaints from mass e-mailers over the problem."

Comments

Norton Antispam

[devphaeton]

The absolute biggest piece of hilarity is Norton Antispam. People rush out and buy it, and install it on their computers. Usually they never do anything in the way of setting it up (just expect it to work magically), but that makes no difference because it continually reconfigures itself on its own whims.

And then they call and abuse their ISP support personnel for days on end of "I'm not getting any of my damned email!!"

And it's all right there in their 'Deleted Items' folder. :rolleyes:

I've Definitely Had Problems With AOL

[John_Booty]

I used to work for a company that sent emails to medical professionals regarding ongoing clinical drug studies.

These emails absolutely took "opt-in" to the next level.

Not only did the doctors opt-in to receive these emails, they had to go through a fairly rigorous screening process to be eligible to receive them. On top of that, it actually would have been highly illegal for us to send these emails to others!

So, needless to say, the emails weren't spam and were going to modestly-sized email lists of 100-1,000 total recipients, approx 25% of which were AOL users.

And still, we had countless problems with AOL blocking them. AOL never listened nor responded.