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FilteringProblems

I'm responsible for mailing our AYE News to people who have expressed interest in AYE.

Recently, I've been having some problems. For example,

- one company filtered my most recent news because it had the word Xtreme, as in Xtreme Programming or Xtreme Testing. Apparently the though I was sending X-rated material. I changed the word to Extreme, and the news went through. But how may other inappropriate filters are being applied that I have no way of finding out about? I'd welcome hearing of any that people know.

- Some ISPs seem to be throwing out all our mailings to their members. AOL is one, a big one. Does anybody know how I can get through to AOL members who want to hear about AYE? Let me know. Or post stuff here.

Thanks, JerryWeinberg 2003.02.16

I'm thinking AOL is either looking for and blocking identical emails to multiple subscribers, or AOL black-listed your domain address. I don't know how to help, except to suggest googling for an answer.

KeithRay 2003.02.17

the goole idea is a good one. I'll let people know if I find out anything. - jerry

Earthlink is home to a pretty good collection of spammers. Add the fact that Earthlink is #3 in total subscriber volume, with AOL losing share fast, and there is ample motivation for one to block the other. "Back in the day" some e-mail implementations blocked AOL for similar reasons.

I'd troll Earthlink's on-line knowledge base, followed by a ping to tech support. With some encouragement, they'll pull server logs to find out what happened.

The other place to look is the blackhole list - a collectively maintained list of "bad" sender addresses that are identified as spammers. Give me a day or so, and I'll get the real name / location / URL. - JimBullock

Jim, thanks for the tips. It's interesting to note that I checked my last 60 spams. 9 of them were sent from AOL addresses. 5 from MSN. None from Earthlink. (Of course, Earthlink might be better at filtering their own spam on the way out, before it reaches their incoming spam filter. - JerryWeinberg 2003.02.18

How many AYE messages have you sent? That would allow a first check on the delivery by us hopeful recipients.

MikeMelendez 2003.02.18

MIke,

Two as of 2/18/03. (If you missed them, you can read them on the website -- http://www.ayeconference.com/moreinformation.html, but we'd still like to get our email glitch figured out!)

ED 02/18/03

One of the black hole lists lives here:

As an at best loosely regulated list, there's some variation in the threshold of "abuse" it takes to get on there. And sometimes there is some game playing. For example, several years ago when I was working at Harris, one of Harris' would-be competitors issued several press releases about how Harris was "abusive" with "spam" and had been black hole listed. Well a couple things were true:

• Some domains had identified Harris as a "spam" producer and asserted that blocking was a Good Thing.
  • The assertion was made by system administrators looking at the volume of mail coming from the domain, not from users getting unwanted e-mail.
  • Harris includes simple opt-out instructions in every e-mail sent.
• Contrary to the competitor's press releases, Harris polling used at the time a double opt in to be part of the panel. You have to sign up twice.
• Upon investigation, this competitor had business relationships with all of the domain sys admins who had declared Harris a spammer.
• Same competitor had their own non-opt in, on-line polling capability.

Such snafus often create calls for "regulation uber-alles". Which is fine if there's a consistent, complete, implementable policy that everyone agrees with. Most real problems aren't that clean. A few years ago there was a lawsuit attempted by someone who's activities were listed there (not Harris), which got thrown out. It isn't regulation, it's information.

It's also true that load testing / simulation-playback tools could be used to fake spam, or other kinds of traffic, with the appearance that it was coming from someone else's domain. There are various ways to fake origins of many kinds of traffic, as well as providing large volumes. There was no evidence that this was done in the Harris case, although some of the "offensive" traffic happened when no large poll was in progress. What a tangled web we weave . . .

- JimBullock, 2003.02.19