E-Paper
Legit e-mail at risk, spam controls tighten
Sometimes the only way to know whether an e-mail got through is to call. Just ask Ashley Friedlein, who runs E-consultancy Ltd in London.
Sometimes the only way to know whether an e-mail got through is to call. Just ask Ashley Friedlein, who runs E-consultancy Ltd in London. He never heard back from a correspondent in the United States, a subscriber of Verizon Online. So he phoned and learned his e-mail was never received. "I wouldn't have known anything about it had I not called to check" he said.
Blame the mishap on increasingly aggressive spam controls employed by Verizon and other e-mail operators. As spammers identify new tricks for sneaking their junk past software sentinels, service providers' technical parries could put even more legitimate mail at risk.
A lot of spam simply ends up in junk folders that recipients never check. But sometimes service providers reject such messages outright, meaning recipients have no control even if they turn spam filters off.
Most of the recent complaints have been directed at Verizon. Though the company denies it has changed its policies, leaked excerpts from an internal memo that circulated late last year talked of new techniques that might disrupt legitimate e-mail.
"If we didn't block we would have so much volume that our platform couldn't even handle that," Verizon spokeswoman Bobbi Henson said. "Instead of just a small number of customers not (getting legitimate mail), virtually everyone would not be getting mail."
Although Verizon has been getting the recent attention, it is hardly alone in misclassifying legitimate messages as spam. In the industry, such mail are known as "false positives." E-mail lists and newsletters sent in bulk are often misclassified. There's no good way to tell which service providers are better at handling legitimate messages because they all tend to be secretive about their specific techniques and change them regularly to keep spammers off guard.
Microsoft and Yahoo say they now have mechanisms for quickly refining filters should users start reporting mail in spam folders as "not junk." E-mail providers are more willing to let legitimate senders prove their worth and get themselves on "always accept" white lists, said Stephen Currie, director of e-mail products at EarthLink Inc.
Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online also have been working on ways to authenticate e-mail senders — to identify legitimate senders and bless their messages before spam filters kick in.
But even as service providers get smarter, so have spammers. They have new software that automatically routes junk messages through a real user's Internet service provider so spam traffic gets mixed with legitimate mail.
