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."

Spam filters are fun...

[TripMaster Monkey]

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....

^_^

Re:Spam filters are fun...

[nizo]

My favorite behaviour is when someone forwards me a message marked as spam by our filter that shouldn't be marked as such. They always leave the [SPAM] in the subject, so of course the message always gets stuffed into MY spam folder where it sits until I decide to go clear it out. The solution to this of course was to create a mail alias (notspam) that doesn't get filtered for them to forward the email to, but of course no one ever uses it.

Re:Spam filters are fun...

[KiloByte]

You can whitelist most of your coworkers. Not by the address, of course, but by the IP used for sending the mail.

Re:Spam filters are fun...

[ePhil_One]

Our Spam filter is known to be horid. I let it mark stuff as Spam by pre-pending SPAM: to the subject, but its up to the user to filter based on it.

I myself rely on CloudMark's SafetyBar, its typically very good, based on a open user reporting protocol. While I'm very careful to only mark real Spam for their system, clearly there are plenty of users marking my RedHat mailing lists as Spam as well. I've become concerned that my marking stuff as NOT SPAM has stopped sending anything back to the server and ju

Re:Spam filters are fun...

[GoRK]

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.

Re:Spam filters are fun...

[einstienbc]

Well I actually live in IRC and though we don't use AOL any more, this shall serve as yet another reason a switch to DSL has merit.

AOL customer satisfaction here:

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Here's a typical Florida alert email. We at AOL highlighted the words that tripped our email filter:

Dear Valued Florida Alert System Customer,

Please be advised that a cyclone developing over the Atlantic can MAKE A HUGE WAVE IN A VERY SHORT TIME!

This information is credited to Dr. Adewale Ngurubo, head of Nigeria's Natural Disaster Catastrophes department. We estimates potential damages to run up to 419 million dollars. THIS IS A SERIOUS WARNING!

[If you wish to be taken off the list, please click here

Re:AOL customer satisfaction here:

[DJStealth]

Clearly a joke, the spam filters will think it's a nigerian scam. However, it's scary to think that it is possible that such an alert could be real and marked as spam with a very high score.

This just in:

[Neil Blender]

Spam filters not perfect, more to come...

Re:This just in:

[(54)T-Dub]

Yes, but the problem is that AOL's so called "whitelist" is more like a gray list. My company has an extensive parternship with AOL supplying all of their real estate listings yet still we can not get all of our email through their servers. Essentially their whitelist just gives you more leeway for those dumb people who would rather mark something as spam instead of unsubscribing from something they asked for. Instead of only needing X "this is spam" clicks we need X+Y number of clicks. so. freaking. dumb.

Mod parent up

[TheSpoom]

This was my first thought when I saw this article (and reading between the lines, it seems to be trying to provoke a predictable response at an easy target, namely AOL). Admittedly whitelisting should work though.

AOL Kills

[captain_craptacular]

Using AOL CAN in fact kill you.

Misuse of email?

[nizo]

...e-mailed emergency alerts, which provide a heads-up on hurricanes, tornados, and other weather events...

I think this sums up the problem right here; are these people relying on email to keep them updated on potentially life-threatening situations? Don't get me wrong, these messages shouldn't be marked as spam, but depending solely on these email warnings is seriously asking for trouble, considering how many different things can delay these messages or even cause them to disappear completely. Email wasn't designed to be a bulletproof message delivery system.

Re:Misuse of email?

[fishdan]

I don't think of email as "bullet proof" but I do have a *special* email address that sends to my cellphone. For those REALLY critical things. I don't rely on it alone for critical things -- like weather alerts when I'm sailing, but in the absence of any thing else, it's one good way to get notified about stuff. Of course, I use Spamgourmet [spamgourmet.com] to protect the address.

Re:Misuse of email?

[El Cubano]

I think this sums up the problem right here; are these people relying on email to keep them updated on potentially life-threatening situations?

The same can be said of radio, television, and even telephone. The point is that it is an additional means of notification. I.e., if you get the information out via enough different types of media, hopefully everyone will get it.

It's not like they said that the email is now the only way to get the alerts. I presume the National Weather Service still makes the appropriate announcements and the local TV and radio stations also carry the information.

Re:Misuse of email?

[nizo]

As long as the people who sign up for this realize the limitations of email there isn't a problem, but I would bet good money that the average Joe thinks that email is as reliable as, say, 911 emergency service (which in some cases isn't that reliable, but that is another topic).

Re:Misuse of email?

[stefanlasiewski]

People who live in a Hurricane region probably don't rely solely on these email warnings.

Usually these email alert systems are tied into other region-wide alert systems. The messages are also distributed through the Weather radio stations, the emergency radio stations, via an automated phone system, fax alerts, the Emergency Broadcast System, etc.

FEMA was working on such systems before they got wrapped into the Department of Homeland Security. These days, I think there is a fair amount of funding for thes

Re:Misuse of email?

[LWATCDR]

Misuse or not does an RSS feed seem like a better plan?

Re:Misuse of email?

[aardvarkjoe]

Don't get me wrong, these messages shouldn't be marked as spam,

See, this is where you get into the realm of what some people consider appropriate, and some don't. I'm of the opinion that any message that was mailed to thousands of recipients most certainly should be marked as spam. If I sign up for a mailing list, I can whitelist it myself. If you trust your ISP to do your spam filtering without any input from you ... well, of course not everyone is going to be satisfied with the results.

Re:Let's not forget...

[Winkhorst]

Let's not forget that AOL began as a closed system like the early phone companies. You literally couldn't make a call to someone on a competing phone system. AOL is just using spam as an excuse to try to return to its original business model. They obviously think they have enough clout in the marketplace to do this without marginalizing themselves. I wish them luck. NOT!

What they are really going to accomplish is to lose anybody who depends on incoming email for important matters. I would think this would

Domain Keys works

[fishdan]

I used to get filtered out by a few places -- mainly because I send from a Comcast owned IP address, and SPEWS [spews.org] 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 [sourceforge.net] (and probably more importantly since Yahoo! implemented it [yahoo.com]) I have not had a "your server is bad" email bounce.

Re:Domain Keys works

[Martin Blank]

Have you seen any good HOWTO docs on implementing DomainKeys? I've seen a handful of attempts to explain, but nothing really solid on how to go about implementing it. We may be installing a new mail server soon where I work ("That old Sun box just ain't what it used to be, ain't what it used to be, ain't what it used to be...") and I'm wondering if maybe we can use the occasion to bring ourselves up to date.

I wonder if part of the problem here is part of the advice that we in the tech community give to c

Reliability

[fembots]

How can email be reliable for critical information? It can be lost easily, email address can be mispelled, the internet connnection can be down, computer that is checking the emails can be down, recipient can be playing games and didn't see the incoming emails.

Re:Reliability

[lukewarmfusion]

I receive server status alerts on my cell phone. That's accomplished by sending an email to two addresses - one that I check and one that forwards as an SMS to whatever carrier I'm using.

And if you've ever worked in an office with no windows and no TVs, you might not realize there was a weather alert. I used to work right through tornado warnings without knowing the sirens were on...

For critical things like emergency notifications, the more options the better. Note that I have other procedures in place fo

E-mail for emergencies?

[winkydink]

I dunno about you, but I'm going to look to a more universal broadcast media (radio, tv) for emergency info, not, "Hey, the sky's looking kinda dark & ominous, I better go check my email."

You obviously have an office with a window

[Rhys]

Not all of us have that luxury. Or to be more specific in my case, not all of us have an office who's window actually opens to the outside. My office windows open onto the atrium (UIUC's Digital Computer Lab has been expanded 3 times so far in it's approx 50-60 year life). Occasionally the sun shines in, usually not.

Now, we do have our operations center monitoring an emergency weather alert box and telling people when to head for shelter, but this whole assuming people (in computing, no less) see the sun i

Re:You obviously have an office with a window

[JPelorat]

Wow. Your office has a window? You lucky freak =)

Re:You obviously have an office with a window

[TykeClone]

but this whole assuming people (in computing, no less) see the sun is kinda odd.

It would also seem to be odd looking for the sun when a tornado or a hurricane is approaching!

In all seriousness, I think that a big enough tornado will suck clouds into it and will allow for clear blue sky near the system. So in that case, seeing the sun might be kind of a scary deal.

Re:E-mail for emergencies?

[JPelorat]

Clearly you've never worked at a facility that didn't allow radios or televisions, or had outside windows easily viewable from all locations.

Some of us work in functional caves, and only get to see the outside world a few times a day. My office, the server room, is like this. I'm in here pretty much all day. Sometimes the drive-home weather is a surprise..

Re:E-mail for emergencies?

[winkydink]

And those facilities leave you on your own in emergency situations? Sounds like a pretty sh!tty place to work if you ask me.

Re:E-mail for emergencies?

[JPelorat]

We only have about 50 people here, and to be honest there are only a few offices that are completely enclosed (mine happens to be one of them). If there's a serious problem brewing, someone gets on the building intercom and makes an announcement.

But yeah, it's pretty shitty, just not for that reason.

Re:E-mail for emergencies?

[rackrent]

The really beneficial use of E-mail for emergencies would be in the workplace. I briefly held a position where I was also "Building Manager." Since I didn't have weather radio handy in my office, getting an e-mail from Facilities Management that we were in a Tornado Watch or some such thing was probably the most useful means of communication. Certainly much easier than having them telephone everyone.

Granted these were Internal e-mails, but the idea was pretty good, and it worked. It's too bad AOL has t

Re:E-mail for emergencies?

[ScentCone]

I dunno about you, but I'm going to look to a more universal broadcast media (radio, tv) for emergency

Actually, I've very happily used systems like this to get highly localized alerts about other places, where my local broadcasting services would be useless. For example, say you have elderly parents 300 miles away... it's nice, while you're toiling in your cube, to get a little info about impending scary weather in distant Smalltown, and to make a check-up phone call.

Or, say I'm planning on going phea

Spam filtering

[FlyByPC]

Those mails are probably just "get-safe-quick" schemes anyway. Not surprising the spamfilter snagged 'em...

In other news,

[DJCacophony]

A freak hurricane has struck the AOL offices in Flordia. Officials are baffled as to why the AOL employees had no warning.

Similar experience with ScanUSA vs Yahoo Mail

[stefanlasiewski]

I use Scan USA [scanusa.com] 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 [scanusa.com]


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.

Cure worse than the disease?

[suresk]

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?

Shotgun approach.

[www.sorehands.com]

As I had said to several attorneys, filing a spam lawsuit against a spammer is the 2nd clearest way of saying that spam is not welcome. The clearest ways is the shotgun method.

If people used shotguns on spammers, it will reduce spam.

Re:Cure worse than the disease?

[TFGeditor]

"Aparently b/c they block all comcast email."

There is a reason for that.

Of the spam that winds up in my filtered folder, on any given day 50-70 percent comes from a Comcast IP address.

If enough Comcast customers would either switch and tell Comcast why or complain about them not locking down there servers (most are configured as open proxies), them maybe Comcast would get off their greeedy asses and do something about it.

Blame Comcast, not AOL.

AOL are generally a nightmare for mail

[Peter Cooper]

I'm beginning to see quite a few forums and other places that use e-mail addresses saying things like "Please don't use an AOL address here, enter another e-mail address" and so on. AOL is getting a bad reputation for its handling of mail.

AOL has no problem with blacklisting people willy-nilly, even if they're other ISPs. I only have experience with a few large companies and their mail systems, but all have been blocked by AOL at some time or another for some supposed transgression.

It's high-time that those of us who run web-apps, and the like, took a stand against AOL and banned the use of their e-mail addresses in our systems. They're more trouble than they're worth.

Re:AOL are generally a nightmare for mail

[Kainaw]

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 t

AOL isn't always bad

[jchawk]

People bitch and moan about AOL blocking things, but they are easy to work with and willing to white list your mailings.

From a whois of aol.com

Technical Contact:
America Online, Inc.
22000 AOL Way
Dulles, VA 20166
US
Tel. [phone]
Email: [e-mail]

If you are doing mass mailings you need to setup a feedback loop with AOL in order to track the amount of complaints your mailings are generating. If you keep the complaint level below their set thresh hold you will not have problems with AOL, it's really as simple as that.

Re:AOL isn't always bad

[qw(name)]

You've obviously bever tried to get off the blacklist, have you? I just moved to a new web server and my mail server is served off a shared IP (web host company) and I've been trying for 4+ months to have my email allowed through their system. I can't send my kids (who use AOL) email.

AOL sounds all concerned when you contact them but they don't do anything about it.

Re:AOL isn't always bad

[jchawk]

Actually I deal with this stuff all the time. I work as a Systems Engineer for a mid-sized ISP in Pittsburgh PA.

These companies aren't impossible to deal with if you simply ask what they need you to do in order allow your mail.

Unfortunately if you choose to go with a $4.95 a month hosting company you're going to run into trouble. Sometimes there is simply nothing you can do when people go with ultra-low cost hosting services who don't respond to spam complaints. You get what you pay for.

If you want so

Re:AOL isn't always bad

[DeathFlame]

But the issue is not just AOL. Okay I do this for AOL. Now what if some other ISP h as the same problem. Okay we talk to them too. Now we go deeper... We're doing mass mailings across the country, we have to deal with a fairly large number of companies. Do we have to talk to ALL of them, just so that our email gets through? And doing mailings across the country doesn't mean the audience is large enough to warrant such measures. Imagine I've got 1,000 people that want email everytime a new dupe slashdot

Re:AOL isn't always bad - bzzzt - WRONG!

[krbvroc1]

People bitch and moan about AOL blocking things, but they are easy to work with and willing to white list your mailings.

You must not value your time much. First off, I run a high volume mailing list/newsgroup/webforum that has been in operation since 1996. AOL is continually a problem, but nothing like recenetly

As of two weeks ago, all AOL and Compuserve subscribers were removed and the mailing list shut down to those domains.

1) They are not 'easy' to work with. My emails to 'postmaster' went unanswered despite their website saying it was a valid method.

2) Their 'feedback' loops, once you sign up, forwards to you the email that one of their users reported as SPAM. (never mind this is an opt-in w/ confirmation list). AOL strips the 'To' address so you do not know who to contact. It makes the feedback look useless for a mailing list. I have to spend a day or two configuring VERP to figure out who it was.

3) My entire domain got blocked because one AOL user hit 'Report this email as SPAM' a dozen times. It took 3 calls and 3 hours on the phone to resolve.

4) They do offer a 'whitelist'. However to sign up for the whitelist you must agree to their guidelines. http://postmaster.aol.com/tools/whitelist_guides.h tml [aol.com]
What BS is this? They want me to guarantee that my mailing list meets the AOL T&C?

'Any e-mail sent to AOL members must conform to AOL's Community Guidelines http://legal.web.aol.com/aol/aolpol/comguide.html [aol.com]'

5) The whitelist states that every email should have a physical address and contact phone number for unsubscribing. More BS.
'All subscription based e-mail must have valid, non-electronic, contact information for the sending organization in the text of each e-mail including phone number and a physical mailing address.'

They are currently content filtering emails too. Any member of my mailing list two posts a message containing a link to 'angelfire' or 'hotfire' domains are bounced. Entire digets are bounced because a users signature contains their angelfire homepage. I tried to modify the mailing list so that 'http://' was stripped, but AOL still rejected it. Some emails that only contained 'alturl.com' (kinda like tinyurl.com) are bounced.

Re:AOL isn't always bad - bzzzt - WRONG!

[John_Sauter]

2) Their 'feedback' loops, once you sign up, forwards to you the email that one of their users reported as SPAM. (never mind this is an opt-in w/ confirmation list). AOL strips the 'To' address so you do not know who to contact. It makes the feedback look useless for a mailing list.

Could you deal with this by placing a unique ID in each e-mail you send, perhaps as a header? If AOL returns the headers intact you could translate the SPAM report into an Unsubscribe request.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Emp

Re:AOL isn't always bad - bzzzt - WRONG!

[krbvroc1]

Could you deal with this by placing a unique ID in each e-mail you send, perhaps as a header?

Yes, that is what I did. However, this is very inefficient. Normally when you run a mailing list the same messages gets sent in one 'smtp' exchange with a mail server. Think of sending the same message to 50 recipients. Only one copy of the message is needed and you tell the AOL SMTP server the 50 recipients. Once you start having to 'personalize' each message, that one message needs to be sent 50 times to each recipients. A waste of time and bandwidth.

Re:AOL isn't always bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. Wrong. You think you know, but it's obvious you've never dealt with any serious volume of emails when it comes to AOL. We've repeatedly had problems with AOL, and we're a financial services company. Hence, our customers EXPECT to get the many 'alert' emails we send to them, and when AOL screws up they blame us instead.

AOL is excessive with it's spam blocking policies, probably so that they can air all those totally annoying commercials about how good they are at blocking spam. Yeah, they're good at bl

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:AOL isn't always bad

[Otter]

And then stick a rediculously large number on it. Is AOL really at the 220th block of AOL Way?

As a New England native, this baffled me for a while when I moved to Los Angeles...

Answer: those numbers refer to position in the city grid, not on the street. My inlaws live on a one block long street, but have a six digit address.

Re:AOL isn't always bad

[jchawk]

How many ISP's handle as much email as AOL does? I'm not trying to defend AOL and all of their practices, but honestly I can understand the situation they are in. They just happen to be big enough to get away with things that us smaller guys can't...

I've got the same problem

[DanielMarkham]

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?

Hey guys, this might help:

[lheal]

1. TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK!!!
2. Don't include the sponsored link to [e-mail].
3. Start the mail off with something other than

   Dear Sir:
   I am the son of a wealthy Zwahalian chief here in Nigeria, and we have need of your assistance....

Just a thought.

(The NOAA alerts are all upper case for some reason. I bet the email they send out contains the raw NOAA alert, and that triggers the spam filter all by itself).

Re:Hey guys, this might help:

[Tenebrious1]

(The NOAA alerts are all upper case for some reason. I bet the email they send out contains the raw NOAA alert, and that triggers the spam filter all by itself).

A legacy of the teletype machines first used for widespread NWS alert bulletins, which only had uppercase letters.

Re:Hey guys, this might help:

[Elwood P Dowd]

If all-uppercase were a strong indicator of spam status, we'd wind up blocking 90% of AOL's legitimate outgoing email.

This is not a real problem in this case

[SSpade]

Broken spam filters are a serious problem, but this isn't really the best example of them (the fact that they catch personal, one-to-one email is a much more serious problem and harder to solve).

There are fairly well documented ways [aol.com] to help ensure that your legitimate email is not caught by spam filters at many ISPs. AOLs is one of the oldest and one of the simplest to sign up for. It's free, too.

Indian River County has chosen to A) not sign up for that system themselves and B) send their email themselv

The real problem...

[slavemowgli]

The real problem here is not the fact that spam filters aren't 100% perfect and will give false positives occasionally. FWIW, the real problem is not that people subscribe to (opt-in) mailing lists and then mark the messages they get as spam, either.

The REAL problem is that ISPs and Webmail providers use non-user specific spam filters that allow malicious users to perform what is essentially a denial of service attack. Of course, the users in this particular example who flagged the emails as spam are probably just stupid, not malicious, but I at least could just as well imagine spammers signing up for webmail services, sending each other spam and flagging it as valid email, for example, in an effort to "teach" the spam filter that it's not really spam after all.

The only real solution would be to move to a per-user filter configuration, but it's not clear to me how practical that would be. You could use a bayesian filter with automatic learning that also gets updated when the user reports false positives/negatives, and initially use another system (like SpamAssassin) until the filter is fully trained; but it's not clear what the computing costs of that really are (not to mention diskspace requirements for the token databases).

Considering the fact that signing up for these web-based services is usually free, I think that we will see more of this in the future.

Re:The real problem...

[Otter]

Of course, the users in this particular example who flagged the emails as spam are probably just stupid, not malicious...

I don't know about this particular mailing, but generally it's due less to stupidity or malice than to a combination of laziness and difficulty of unsubscription. I have to use procmail to block Ticketmaster emails because they simply will not unsubscribe me! If there isn't a prominent "Click here to unsubscribe!" (and, remember, users have been trained to avoid those!), they'll find a d

Spam

[robpoe]

It's interesting. When someone signs up for something, they just decide to click the button to receive it.

When they want to un-subscribe (from a legitimate source) they use the tools provided to them to get rid of it as easily as they can.

Perhaps it's because the computer industry as a whole preaches to them "You'll never be unsubscribed from ANYTHING, by following the directions."

So they hit the "Mark as spam" button and go on with life - the minor annoyance is gone and they can browse their porn unint

Good demonstration

[Spudley]

This is a good demonstration of how spammers are messing things up for everyone. A handful of short-sighted and greedy individuals have turned email into a near-useless medium for many legitimate purposes.

But on the bright side, I hear a lot of the biggest spammers live in Florida? Great. Come the next hurricane season, I hope they all miss something important.

Re:Good demonstration

[Greyfox]

Yeah and good thing those sorts of people don't go outside their houses at all because 6 lanes of northbound traffic on the Interstate is a pretty good clue that something's going on. Watching 6 million people all try to evacuate north up the couple of routes that lead out of Florida all at once is truly a sight to behold. It's particularly fun because no one ever knows exactly where the hurricane will strike, so it could end up plowing right through that line of ants halfway up the coastline.

Opt-In doesn't always mean you can Opt-Out

[Chyeld]

Case in point, I've spent days trying to get unsubscribed to the newsletters that come from OSDN.

However because I've forgotten the password I used, and because for some reason my attempts to reset it have always failed, I've resorted to sorting anything I receive from that domain into the trash.

Re:Opt-In doesn't always mean you can Opt-Out

[British]

Why would any website require a password to UNsubscribe from their precious emails? That seems like the website is putting way too much importance on mass emails.

I see a much lesser problem of people being unintentionally(or someone else intentionally) unsubscribed to announcement lists than the OSDN situation.

Of course I got Quicktime news for many moons after I said several times to unsubscribe.

Especially if you no longer use the email address

[grahamsz]

I get quite a bit of spam that I probably did opt in for 5 or 10 years ago. Unfortuantely some of if requires that you send an unsubscribe message FROM the email address that they sent the spam too.

My of my 'legacy' email addresses forward to my inbox and i cant easily send email from them. Obviously I could change my mailer to set an appropriate from address - but it's easier just to mark it as spam.

Reverse-blacklists?

[Just Some Guy]

I just thought of this while I was reading the article summary, so this isn't exactly well thought out, but...

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...

Laziness

[jjeffrey]

The problem here is laziness. So many of us, me included, rather than just unsubscribing from opt-in lists, hit the junk button in our mail client. On my mac that's harmless. When an AOL user does it and the client reports home, it causes chaos. And it takes *forver* to get off these lists. I run a mail forwarding service for some local companies, Yahoo decided I was sending SPAM (I wasn't, but SPAM was being sent to the people I was forwarding mail for). I had to fill in the same form describing my "mailing list policy" three times, each time explaining I don't have a list and therefore don't need a policy..... Current anti spam systems are self defeating. We need something better. SPS is NOT it - http://www.spfsucks.com/ [spfsucks.com] - Domain Keys is better, but really I think we need something better than SMTP. My suggested way forward would be that to be accepted by an e-mail system the mail *must* be signed with the identity of the sender, and their public key listed with a CA. Then before your server accepted the mail you could verify the sender, and SPAMmers could have their certs revoked quite quickly. Would probbaly need to be a government organisaiton though - don't want veriswine doing it.

Re:Laziness

[MisanthropicProgram]

rather than just unsubscribing from opt-in lists,

That's assuming that "unsubscribing" really unsubscribes you from a list.
I can see how a biz will get "real" opt-in email lists, but prevent folks from unsubscribing just so they can sell their list saying "Ours is REALLY an opt-in."

Laziness... or last resort?

[Dammital]

"So many of us, me included, rather than just unsubscribing from opt-in lists, hit the junk button in our mail client."

Sometimes you can't opt-out! A friend of mine with a houseboat thought it would be a good idea to sign up for a weather alert service promoted by a local TV station. (WESH in Orlando, for those who care.) He submitted the email address for his pager, which dutifully beeped him whenever there was a possibility of severe weather in the area.

Problem was that the pager went off altogether too frequently, and my friend didn't care if there was a storm cell in -say- Flagler County, a hundred miles to the northeast. So he tried to unsubscribe, again and again and again... and those damned alerts just kept on comin'.

The list was really easy to get onto, but impossible to opt out of. My friend eventually had to change pagers to lose the things.

Moral: sometimes those broadcasts are solicited email that are no longer welcome, and there is no way to unsubscribe. I'd call that "spam": no-longer-solicited bulk email.

All Three of Them

[flood6]

This seems increasingly common, and even the whitelisting by smarter recipients doesn't fix it.

...smart AOL users...?

It just goes to show

[Enigma_Man]

That e-mail shouldn't be relied upon for mission-critical anything . These people wouldn't receive the weather emergencies if they weren't at their computer anyway, so it's not something that should be relied upon for immediate communication.

It also goes to show that heuristic and other such spam filters are a really terrible idea. I've had more problems than not with spam filters, so I just keep them shut off on my public accounts nowadays.

-Jesse

Re:It just goes to show

[Obfuscant]

These people wouldn't receive the weather emergencies if they weren't at their computer anyway, so it's not something that should be relied upon for immediate communication.

I have some email addresses that get forwarded to my phone. I have an email address FOR my phone. My phone is always on, and I am almost always near it. I don't have to be "at my computer" to get my email. How old-fashioned, thinking one would have to be "at a computer" to get email.

I hope AOL gets its pants sued off for blocking SO

happened to me

[jd142]

Found this out in testing. We send messages to students enrolled in our program. I was initially bccing a large list. But places like Hotmail and Yahoo were marking them as spam.

My solution was to simply loop through the list of email addresses and send each student an individual message. A little more resource intensive, but since the messages are occassionally important for their their coursework(as opposed to the occassional "cookies in the lounge" type messages) we couldn't afford to have any messages marked as spam.

Re:happened to me

[legirons]

"Found this out in testing. We send messages to students enrolled in our program. I was initially bccing a large list. But places like Hotmail and Yahoo were marking them as spam."

Basically, email doesn't currently seem a very good method for broadcasting messages to a large number of opt-in recipients.

It needs some system where people configure their client to say what they want to subscribe to, and then let the upstream servers know what to filter for. Perhaps a system where you could post the message t

Darwin in Action

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

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 ... and icy extremities.

Spam filters are not the problem here

[Simonetta]

It bears remembering here that spam filters are not really the problem.

The problem is the spammers.

Kill the spammers (yes, I do mean that, I'm not using that term as a shorthand for denying their bandwidth access) and all the problems with the spam filters will solve themselves.

Spamming is not a free speech issue. It's an issue of people stealing huge amounts of a public good (bandwidth access) for their own private gain.

Spamming is similar to the Islamic and Jewish prohibition against eati

It takes far fewer thyan 4200 to be labeled "spam"

[amichalo]

I recently had my own OSS spam filter catch a wedding announcement of a friend from college because even though several recipients were in my contact list, many were not.

Too bad we cannot answer our phones, our US mailboxes, or even check email without constant threat of unsolicited advertisement or identity theft.

Time to call AOL

[EvilStein]

http://postmaster.aol.com/ [aol.com]

Talk to them about getting whitelisted. Since it's a government service (Indian River County) they should have little problems getting AOL to permanently whitelist the originating IP address.

Maybe they'll learn this time. :)

Nothing to see here, move along

[gasp]

Oh come on! This is news? An organization is sending out a valid and useful message to a list of subscribers, and some of them have an ISP spam filter that misclassifies it as spam? So we jump on the company providing the filter as if this was intentional or policy?

Wake up, false positives for spam filters are not news, and it's disingenuous to have a headline that implies "ooh, look what the evil AOL is doing now..." Bah, FUD.

Re:Nothing to see here, move along

[ScentCone]

OK, so I submitted the article, and I was pretty much expecting a comment like this. "Bah" seems reasonable. "FUD," perhaps not. Really, the point, from my perspective, was the issue of a filter (like AOL's) that doesn't really swing into action until a fair number of subscribers (who sought out and asked to get the mail!) act to describe the mail as spam. Of course this is going to happen some, but it feels a bit skewed, somehow. So, my question in the summary was really the focus: how bad is the Blamed By

Mass e-mail probably ruined for a long time

[SunFan]

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.

California emergency reports, too

[Animats]

I just realized that spam filtering has been blocking my subscription to California emergency incident reports. I've been missing weather and power warnings.

My local spamassassin filters Amber Alerts

[kriston]

I really believe this is the fault of the email senders. The spamassassin on my email host filters all Amber Alerts, too. The person who sent the mail should have already made arrangements to get the email through to the proper people.

The article doesn't mention it but what are the chances that the email sender is using a well-known SPAM tool, or a well-known SPAM tactic?

And this is why

[Errtu76]

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.

AOL mail stupidity

[SCHecklerX]

I run a small list for my cycling team. Today things started to bounce: http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554hvub1.htm l [aol.com] No idea what is triggering THAT one.

Sample e-mail

[Muhammar]

Hurricane Lisa is expected to make the landfall in 48 hours. You too can get away on a luxury cruise using our last-minute reservation. Also, take adavantage of our 60% Viagra discount and stock up before the likely power outage.

Seriously, everybody here in Florida in hurricane season is watching the NOAA page for last updates, and all TV and radio stations have continuous coverage - it is actualy very difficult to escape the hurricane latest news. I would not worry about the e-mail alerts.

AOL does this for tons of lists

[DeadSea]

AOL blacklists by ip address of the server sending the mail whenever some number of aol users who subscribe to the mailing list hit the "report as spam" button on their email client.

For legit mailing lists you wouldn't think this would happen, but an unbelievable number of aol users treat the "report spam" button as if it were the "trash" button.

To get unblocked by AOL you have to set up an account at which you will receive a request to unsubscribe from each user that uses the "report as spam" button.

Ho-hum

[Y2]

This is old news to anyone who has ever operated a mailing list with a nontrivial number of AOL subscribers.

Re:I've always wondered...

[calibanDNS]

The article seems to indicate that the messages are being marked as spam by AOLs automated spam filtering engines.

Re:I've always wondered...

[ScentCone]

That is my experience, actually. AOL rarely seems to block a source until a good number of their users have registered a complaint by clicking the (almost too easy to use) "this is spam" button. I suspect that some people think that's easier than unsubscribing, and don't think about the larger consequences.

Re:I've always wondered...

[ScentCone]

Maybe it's because we've just finished teaching people that the "Unsubscribe" links in (genuine) SPAM aren't to be trusted. So now we're expecting them to know that an "Unsubscribe" link in a legitimate email is OK to click on?!?

Well, a little critical thinking isn't too much to ask for. Especiall when the mail they're looking at is one they asked for. That should make them a little less queasy about clicking the unsubscribe link. With AOL, though, one of the problems may be that certain presentations of

Re:I've always wondered...

[maxwells_deamon]

At a place I used to work I was in charge of the spam filters. I got a complant that sprint picture mail (photos taken with a camera phone) would not get through.

Well to make a long story short, there was so much advertizing in the stuff that sprint wrapped arround the picture that spamassassin blocked it.

I do not know what is up with these messages, however I suspect it may be the same.

I pay sprint when I send a picture mail, why do they have to put 800 numbers and such in them...

Re:I've always wondered...

[SSpade]

Why do people mark messages as spam that they willingly signed up for?

Several reasons. One is that the AOL user interface is pretty bad and it's easy to hit the button by accident.

Another is that people tend to select large swathes of messages in their inbox and mark them as spam in bulk, often mixing in the occasional legitimate email in the spam.

Another is that senders often don't make it clear enough who their email is from and the recipient clicks the This-Is-Spam button before they register that they really wanted it.

Another is that many people use the This-Is-Spam button as an Unsubscribe button, and click it when they don't want the email any more, rather than unsubscribing from the mailing list they signed up for. SpamCop gets used this way too.

(This all may or may not be related to the reason the mail was filed in the bulk folder, though. It was bulk email, the recipients hadn't whitelisted it... it's something of a crapshoot whether it'll get flagged as bulk in that case.)

Those us drunks...

[MisanthropicProgram]

who surf while intoxik..intoxicatited...oh....fushh it!

Re:I've always wondered...

[TFGeditor]

The parent is the most complete and insightful comment so far on this topic.

To elabotrate (not attempt to half-sole), those of us who understand IT often grossly overestimate the average email/web user. I'd estimate that 90 percent of the people I know who use email are clueless about EVERYTHING. Click this, read email. Click this, delete email. Click this, send email. Click this, block email. That's the extent of their knowledge. Most probably think an IP address is the location of a public restroom, and believe Internet Explorer IS "the internet." And I'd bet that a huge chunk of them have at one time or another bought something through a spamvertized website.

Trying to educate them is hopeless--I know, I've tried. The best thing we can do is send as many as possible TO AOL, not try to lure them away from it. The protections AOL has in place makes knowledgeable users cringe, but they also protect the rest of us from clueless users, and those users from each other and themselves.

I say go AOL, go!

Re:I've always wondered...

[HeelToe]

I'm not sure that's specifically at the heart of the problem here, but I would suspect most people do it out of laze:

"How do I opt out of getting this stupid thing? Fuggit, if I mark it spam, the rest won't show up."

Re:Email unreliable? No way!

[TripMaster Monkey]

Beating him won't get your mail to you any faster.

Try plying him with liquor instead.

Re:Should be criminial.

[oneiros27]

Then don't buy from AOL.

They make their Terms of Service available, and if it's not something that you accept, then don't buy service from them. Odds are, there's something in there that specifically states that they are not required to deliver every e-mail to you.

There are many people that simply do not want spam filtering (yes, this might seem odd to people out there, but if the cost of a false positive results in the loss of a large business contract, your cost of one lost legitimate message may outwe

Re:*bing!* you got gale

[StalinsNotDead]

Why would the puny weather system bother even Floridian Slashdotters? I for one haven't been out of my mother's basement for twenty five years!

The water table in Florida is such that in most locations, basements are not feasible.

Re:Time for AOL to fix their spam handling!

[TFGeditor]

The problem is Comcast, not AOL.

As I posted to another comment, of the spam that winds up in my filtered folder, on any given day 50-70 percent comes from a Comcast IP address. SpamCop lists Comcast as the biggest source of spam, period.

If enough Comcast customers would either switch and tell Comcast why or complain about them not locking down there servers (most are configured as open proxies), them maybe Comcast would get off their greeedy asses and do something about it.

Blame Comcast, not AOL.