spam problems

[cellio]

This morning I received mail, forwarded by my email provider, from AOL. They were threatening to blacklist our entire domain because of a spam complaint (note use of the singular). I was getting this complaint because a single piece of spam was sent by some third party via a mailing list I own. So they were threatening to blacklist us, though we were only the vehicle. That's like going after the phone company because a telemarketer called you.

I've since fixed the mailing list to close that particular loophole, at some inconvenience to some list members. I also sent a message to the list saying, basically, be more careful in targetting your complaints. But it turns out it's only partially the fault of the list member who complained.

AOL makes it very easy for people to complain about spam, even if they didn't mean to. Apparently, the current UI is such that many people accidentally hit the "complain" button when they meant to hit the "delete" button. My sys admin told me of cases where AOL users "complained", presumably erroneously, about messages that they had sent. Talk about bad interface design! Quick, send them some experts in human-computer interaction! Heck, send them any intern from any HCI program.

AOL is huge, and they're certainly not going to investigate every spam complaint. Smaller providers can't afford to do so either. So they'll blacklist sites, usually temporarily, based on complaints, not on investigations. I think it's wrong to target hosts of mailing lists (absent reason to believe that they're being especially reckless), but I suppose this is how things work now. And it's going to get even worse now that the federal government has legalized spam and abolished state laws that limited it.

I'm not sure, but I might have liked it better when the uncertainty in email delivery came from the UUCP chain rather than from blacklists (and black holes). At least then everyone who was using email knew it wasn't necessarily reliable; now people just assume you're ignoring them. Sigh.

But all of this did finally prod me into learning enough about procmail tonight to set up some filtering on my own inbox. The spam has been getting a lot worse in recent months, up from 10-20 messages a day to more like 100. So I finally have candidate spam going to its own folder that I'll check in on from time to time. In the few hours it's been in place it's caught 23 pieces of spam, missed three pieces of spam, and caught no non-spam. So far, so good.

Comments

[cellio]

Is your family resistant to the idea of moving from AOL to someone else? What if some helpful relative came in and did all the setup work for them, so all they had to do was cough up a credit card and a password?

A few years ago we helped set up my father-in-law and his wife with AOL. (We had gone to visit, and they said something like "while you're here can you get us onto the internet?" and handed us a CD. They are, ahem, not the most technically-ept folks we know.) And the process really was very, very easy. I think that's why people like it -- setup is very easy, most spam is filtered out (along with mail you wanted, but you don't know about that), and the UI gives the impression of doing all the right things. The user who erroneously clicks on that "complain" button, for example, never learns of his error -- you click it and the mail goes away, just like you wanted, and that's it. You may never know that real people can no longer send you mail, until they tell you.

[kmelion.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my dad is very resistant to changing ISPs. He's worried he won't be able to get his fishing reports anymore. My brother and I (when I was there) complained constantly about the slowness and the disconnects. My dad blamed it on the computer.