A couple of times this past week, a group email I had sent out failed to get to some of its recipients. I checked the addresses – no problem there. I can only conclude that a spam filter somewhere snagged it… or alternatively, the recipients, thinking it was spam, deleted it by mistake. I do know that my local spam filter, on my PC, catches a certain amount of legitimate stuff and calls it spam. The corporate spam filter seems quite a bit better – very few false positives.
I use Gmail and I only had two false positives in the past year that I know of. Both were rather important messages and both happened within the past month, but I think I understand why they looked like spam. One was a short foreign-language message with attachment, the other’s title was “wedding video” and most of the text was discussing pricing.
It happens. Every ISP configures their spam filters differently - from their spam definitions to how they deal with it.
Some respond to the sender with info, some just delete. Some move to a folder for the user to sort out later. Some respond based on X definitions (not all), some move based on X definitions (not all) and some delete based on X definitions (not all).
Spam is an absolute nightmare for anyone who runs a mail server. It’s hands-down the worst part of my job (and we only host about 1000 email accounts for about 40 different domains).
People complain about too much spam, and you spend a ton of money getting spam filter software and/or hardware. Then some complain about stuff being mis-labeled as spam, and others complain that too much spam is still getting through. So you can’t delete anything, you still have to process all of this goddamn spam email, adding an extra step to the SMTP process by moving it to another folder. Then you have to explain to everyone 50 times how to access their spam folder. And how to request whitelisting, or how to make their own whitelists.
And that’s just on the receiving end of the SMTP process. People want to know why their email from our server didn’t make it to their friend’s email box (“I do not know about your friend’s ISP’s settings. Everything is correct on our end.”) We have to constantly check blacklists to make sure that some Internet Citizens Arrest didn’t happen and someone decided to put us on a blacklist because your idiot boss thought it’d be a good idea to send an email about a golf outing to 500 random people. Or they add a Blackberry to the mix, and don’t know how to use that ON TOP OF not knowing how to use our email system to begin with.
Spam is just a nightmare. It’s horrible. It’s the scourge on the whole Internet thing and makes a lot of people miserable (and poor).
Don’t mean to dump on your thread…just wanted to remind people that everyone is doing what they can to make email work all nice and friendly-like - it’s just impossible to make it perfect. Not because we all suck…because spammers suck
Man, recently, I had a client ask me, “did you receive that email about such and such”.
No, I don’t think I did.
I sort of forgot about it, then she called me a couple weeks later about the email. I told her I had no such email and she was looking at her sent folder.
So, she resends it while she’s on the phone with me. I see it turn up and get deleted while I’m looking at Outlook.
Anyway, it had a list of cancer sites in it, so it had words like “mouth”, “anus”, “vagina” and “penis”, also “small” and “large” because of the intestine.
it’s not amazing that it got deleted. It’s more amazing it hasn’t happened more often in my work.
Don’t worry about it – it’s interesting to get this perspective. It’s really too bad – email is so perfect for so many things, but spam is really exacting a toll in terms of efficiency, not to mention everyone’s nerves.
Spam filtering is a bitch in healthcare and some other areas. Previously, I worked at a health clinic and general social services place. A social worker complained to me that emails from the 14 year old virgins who were considering having sex for the first time and wanted advice were not getting through. Could we tweak the spam filters to allow them? Without allowing the real spam? Uhh, that’s gonna be tough.
I can tell you that Gmail ABSOLUTELY throws away valid emails. I have one account where the reply-to address is not in the same domain as the sent-from address. Gmail silently discards any emails that I send from this account.
I would suspect that most people loose about 2-10% of valid emails. My wife sent out party invitations to some of my friends, and many never made it to them because HER email address wasn’t in their address book.
I think all of this aggressive spam filtering is causing the system to “break” and I’m interested to see what will replace the current email system.
Personally, I hope we shift to some sort of “registered” email system. You gotta prove who you are somehow, and no “throwaway” accounts. Free email services can stay, they just have to make sure you’re real.
Yup, happens a lot at work, I missed a few emails from months back that only seemed to resurface when we changed to MS Exchange.
Gmail works quite well, but a series of emails based around £150 gift from various UK shopping chains have been sneaking through despite me marking them repeatedly as junk.
Hotmail I gave up on and set it to junk everything that I didn’t ok from my address book :rolleyes:
What do you mean “silently”? Either it’s in your inbox or in the spam folder.
And I don’t believe the 2-10% figure. I get about 100 messages per week in my inbox alone, many more if I count mailing list messages that get sorted to other folders. The last time I got a false positive was 3 weeks ago, so that’s a rate of less than 0.5%.
I just dealt with this problem a few weeks ago. Clients were calling and asking if I got their emails, and I finally figured out that my earthlink spam filter had decided all on its own to block all yahoo.com addys. Stupid thing. I think I have it fixed now, but anything it blocked is irretrievable.
No, but it’s irrelevant. Other accounts receive email from that account. I don’t really care WHERE the problem lies. All I care about is the fact that she doesn’t get my emails. It just is an example of how broken the system is. I have many more such examples.
Our incoming mail provider uses a greylisting process. And another system: an outgoing server sends a message, their incoming server pings (or some similar thing) the sending server to make sure the sending server actually exists, and if it does it delivers the message. It’s totally an automated dialog between servers and it takes probably less than one second. The machine equivalent to: “Hey, did you send something?” “Yes, I did.” “Oh, okay.”
For the sender and receiver, the message travel almost instantaneously, and they don’t have to do any kind of challenge-answer themsevles. I guess most spambots use fake return paths/gateways to hide their origins and they can’t meet this mini-challenge.
That said, half of the messages I send internally end up in my co-workers’ Junk Mail folders. We have been unable to figure out why.
I’m just surprised because I’ve used Gmail exclusively for a couple of years, and there’s not even been one case where I was expecting an e-mail (or told I should have received it), and didn’t find it in the inbox or the spam folder.
Ok, here’s another example:
I purchased an Amazon gift certificate for my Dad’s birthday. He never received it.
I told him to look in his spam folder. Nada.
I went to Amazon and re-sent it. Still nothing.
Then, he looked at one of his filtering rules. It said that any email that had the following words in the subject: blah, blah, pe1ns, etc. gift, stock… Delete from server.
So, he changed it to just send it to his spam folder.
But, it’s even worse than that. I have clients who couldn’t get my emails because of send/receive domain issues, and they never even got a notification that an email was sent - it just gets bounced by their ISP. The email system is fundamentally broken. Think about the Post Office deciding which of your letters to deliver, and which to just discard without telling you. Would you tolerate that system?
It’s not so much that the system is broken but that it is being misused. Of course, the spammers are misusing it but I’m referring to the growing number of companies that put email into business processes expecting it to be a reliable and speedy delivery method.
It isn’t and never was. If the information is really important, or time-sensitive, you need a back-up plan. Just because emails USUALLY arrive virtually instantaneously is no reason to assume they always will. We have client’s using EDI systems that transport the data via email. That’s just silly. (But damn cheap.) We have clients sending out emails that must be responded to within a short time-frame if you want the business. That’s incredibly frustrating to our sales staff when email is delayed or gets spam filtered.
How is that Gmail’s fault? Gmail doesn’t come with filters pre-configured. He must have set up that filter at some point.
Are you complaining about the e-mail system in general, or Gmail in particular?
If you mean the e-mail system itself, yeah I agree it’s “broken” - or to be precise, used for the purpose it was never designed for. It was developed back when the Internet was only for academic and government use.
