(Mis)Uses of Technology

(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick




When Everything Was Spam To Earthlink

from the problems-with-spam-filters dept

While Earthlink promotes the fact that their ISP service comes with a spam filter, there certainly are downsides. You're trusting them not to screw up - and in late October, they screwed up. Due to a misconfiguration, they started blocking plenty of legitimate mail. At least they bounced the messages and told the sender, so they knew their messages didn't get through. However, it's still not a good sign that they did this. People should be careful to only use a spam filter as a tool for sorting, and not to block completely. Most spam filters are going to catch some legitimate mail here and there. The one I uses tends to catch a couple each week, but since I check which emails are held as spam, I can quickly whitelist and move on.

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