@#$@ Filter Frustrations!

Okay, I'm not about to start swearing. But there is a certain word that triggers email filters, and lots of ezine editors have taken to deliberately mis-spelling it so they can even use it in their newsletters. The disguised swear word in the title of this article is my stand-in for that certain word. (Though I may forget and use it yet after all. In fact, I'll have to).

Have you heard that over 82% of all emails nowadays are @#$@ (spam)? Yes, droves of it comes from countries like Russia and China and other obscure places you and I have never been to. People there are discovering the net. The scamsters have got there first, and are teaching them very bad habits!

Meantime, here in North America, the powers that be are being pressured to DO SOMETHING. So guess what, they are coming up with laws and filters to make everything safe - for the law-abiding citizens, meaning we have extra hoops to jump through, and the @#$@ers are still merrily carrying on.

Apparently there was a slight drop in their mailings over February and March, but I read that was just so they could consider how best to use the new CAN-SPAM laws to their own advantage and sneak through the new filters. They're rising steadily again.

Meantime, our ISPs and web hosts are installing these filtration programs like Spam Assassin, and my Sasktel host has one called Postini (by McAfee).

At first I was pleasantly surprised to get only two or three emails at a time, whereas before I'd get pages full at a download, and spend a minute or two just in highlighting and deleting anything and anyone looking the least bit like @$@$ to me.

Last week I went to see in my one host-Admin area, and low and behold! - over 9,000 emails held in my @#$@ filter! I can look through them for ones I want to re-direct to another address, but I can only see 25 at a time. It takes HOURS and HOURS to go through them all. So after a while I gave up and hit the link to delete the whole shootin' match.

I went back about every three days, and it was just as bad. On the weekend I took a look at the non-profit site I manage, and there I discovered among the @#$@ were the messages from our forms on the site.

Well now, how are we going to serve our customers and people we DO want to hear from if they get thrown out like the proverbial baby with the dirty bath water?

So I set about combing through all that @#$#, and to learn how to refine the filters if at all possible so as to get those form responses through to us.

The other day in exasperation, I went to the host's forum to see if anyone else was unhappy with this new service. Someone commented that all the old blocks were removed that we had on emails we had discontinued long ago. Ah-ha! That explains thousands of those filtered @$#@! Many are addressed to addressed I deleted long ago!

I also had about 20 of my articles on autoresponders which were advertised in another woman's e-book. I knew some of those had been snatched to do @#$# as if from my domain. Enough of that; I decided to go delete them all. Not only in my Mail manager, but also in my hidden files in the File manager. So none are available any longer. I'm finished with those autoresponders.

But still the @#$@ kept showing up in the filter. So I opened a few to see which address are they using to get to me? Turns out they are putting any letters and numbers they want before the @domainname.com and that wretched Spam Assassin was letting everything in! Everything!

Well, there's the whitelisting option. I can put down the emails of all the people I do want to hear from, and the addresses of mine that I do want to receive emails to, no matter what. This is tedious work! Am I going to have to put in a complete list of all my subscribers, and any one who is a potential sub or a customer? I'll never get anything else done then!

Now my ISP, (and being in rural Saskatchewan I have but one option), Sasktel has decided to jump on this bandwagon. They use a different third-party service to filter our emails. We also have to go let through what email we DO want to see, but we can mark those as ones that are to be allowed through in the future. I'm not sure yet if this service is better or worse.

All I know is that most of the ezines I've subscribed to are not coming through, and so mine going out are probably not getting seen either. I don't want to make any impulsive decision, but I may have to open a forum or blog on my sites, and just encourage folks to come communicate with me there. At least there the messages show up, although I'd have to police and delete the junk too.

Eventually dust will settle and we'll have to adapt to how things turn out. Some are advocating paying a fee to be allowed to send emails to certain places like Hotmail addresses, etc. It'll be a postage fee kind of deal after all perhaps.

Another deal asks us to pay so many $1000s for the right to send out to our mailing lists. Yeah, right! I can't afford to pay for subscription, - how will my friends?

I tell you, the wild and woolly days of FREE stuff in cyber-space are numbered.

One cheerful bit of news I got the other night was when I read Ken Evoy's ezine; I discovered that he's now hopping mad about this filtration business too. He's a very clever man and had a bunch of propeller heads (as he called them once) in his employ. I'm looking forward to the solution they will come up with! It will work! There's a rainbow at the edge of this storm cloud.

ADDED the following week:

As I said, the host where I have my Ruthes-SecretRoses.com domain and the mission's site, offered Spam Assassin as a service to cut down on our email problems. I tried it out -- and have decided to dump it for good.

If you are used to only getting 3 or 4 emails a day, and say two of those are spam, then ... perhaps it is okay for you.

But on Monday I went to check the filter on the site, because I'd noticed last week that even my good emails, the ezines I WANT to read, and what people were putting in my forms on my site, - much of that was going down the same toilet hole (filter) with all the bad email. Anything addressed to any letters or numbers in front of my domain name was coming through too! Not good. This Monday morning I found 12,200+ emails in the @#$@ filter!

There was no way I could sift through all of those, 25 at a time, even if I skimmed fast, to look for good emails and to re-direct them. I deleted the whole works and disabled Spam Assassin. I want nothing more to do with it!

This issue is not dead. The noise of battle may continue a couple of years yet. So we might find it wise to start bookmarking the sites with online ezine editions and just going around at a certain time each week to READ (or skim, if you wish) the ezines we want to keep up with. You can still get many by email, but don't hold your breath that they will always get through.