The Solution May Be Worse Than The Problem

A study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project concludes that more Americans than ever before regard spam as merely an unpleasant fact of life, nothing to get too upset about. In fact, 28% of the survey respondents said that spam wasn’t a problem at all.

For me, recent anti-spam measures seem like more of a problem than the spam itself. For example, an Earthlink customer recently sent me an e-mail message requesting a response. I wrote back, and within the hour this arrived in my inbox from his Earthlink address:

I apologize for this automatic reply to your email.

To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I have approved beforehand.

If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please fill out the short request form (see link below). Once I approve you, I will receive your original message in my inbox. You do not need to resend your message. I apologize for this one-time inconvenience.

Click the link below to fill out the request:

… and then there was an embedded URL for me to click on.

This annoyed me for three reasons:

1. What I wrote was a solicited e-mail message, but the Earthlink customer never added me to his whitelist when he asked me to get back to him. That was rude. This can’t have been the first time his spam filter has kicked out a legitimate message.

2. Earthlink’s idea of spam control is to subject non-Earthlink customers to a “one-time inconvenience”? My anti-spam regimen should never inconvenience you, and your anti-spam regimen should never inconvenience me.

3. Shouldn’t the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” apply to e-mail messages? Isn’t it always better to let a few spam messages through the filters than to keep legitimate messages from being delivered?

Tags: Anti-Spam

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