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When Your Name Means You Can't Send Email
from the fun-for-the-whole-family dept
We've all heard (or been involved with) stories where certain emails got bounced (or worse, sent to the email blackhole) after being falsely tagged as spam. However, imagine if you had to deal with that almost every day when your legal name includes a "trigger" word. Here's the unfortunate story of a guy named Cockburn (pronounced Co-burn) who finds it very difficult to send out emails these days without having to figure out how to get around a variety of spam defenses. He also claims that his company has problems with his email because it bans the word "specialist" (which is in his title) because it includes the name of the drug "cialis" in the middle of the word.
Reader Comments
(Flattened / Threaded)
Spammers
You know, enacting the death penalty for spammers would likely fix all these problems. Plus, it would bring the rules of evolution back in line by removing the dumbest portion of our population.
On a more serious note, obviously the spam checkers aren't working correctly if they catch "cialis" from specialist... Seems a simple regex of " cialis " would capture the correct words while leaving specialist unharmed. Of course, the spam miscreant could just doctor the word to avoid such a filter.
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Re: Spammers
You know, enacting the death penalty for spammers would likely fix all these problems. Plus, it would bring the rules of evolution back in line by removing the dumbest portion of our population.
There is supposed to be a silent "sarcasm" tag in here, but I forgot the html nazi strips off the tags... So in the blank space, put </sarcasm>.
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Re: Spammers
Perhaps instead we should enact the death penalty on people dumb enough to pass on the name "Cockburn".
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Re: Spammers
or Pecker
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Re: Spammers
it might remove "cialis", but it wouldn't get "!!==>>cialis==!!" ;-)
he should get his company to rename his email to the internet standard c0ckburn
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badly formatted spam filter
"his company has problems with his email because it bans the word "specialist" (which is in his title) because it includes the name of the drug "cialis" in the middle of the word"
His email administrator is an idiot: He's probably using Mail Essentials 5 on an Exchange server; settings in the program can be made to catch "cialis" but not "specialist."
Secondly, just because the dope's name is Cockburn, doesn't mean his email address has to be cock@stupidcompany.com
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Re: badly formatted spam filter
obviously it does.
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Re: badly formatted spam filter
could be worse, had to setup email for a co with the policy first letter first name first three letters of last name with an employee named toni watts!!
now that sucks
even worse she was a sales rep!
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Duh
Email filters look at the body of the text too.
Do you sign your name at the end of an email? He obviously does. Regardless of his email address he is going to get hit.
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