When spam filters go bad

By Laura Miller
June 19, 2003

Salon.com

Trying to block junk mail, my cable modem company installed a system
that prevented me from getting my REAL mail -- and when I
complained, insisted it was all for the good of the System.

"The equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation": That's what
Frank Zappa, testifying before a Senate committee in 1985, called
the censorship plans of the Parents Music Resource Center. In the
annals of overreaction, draconian measures tend to spring from mind-
muddling passions -- in the case of the PMRC, parental desire to
protect the young from nastiness. But when it comes to passion, even
our darkest, most primal instincts can hardly compare to the raw
fury that people have come to feel toward spam. So e-mail users,
beware: It's time to watch your head. I can testify from personal
experience that the cure has finally become worse than the disease.

In June, the company that provides my cable modem service, Road
Runner, installed a superaggressive new set of spam blockers on its
e-mail servers. Late in the first day of the blockers' activation, I
suddenly noticed that I hadn't gotten any e-mail at all in nearly
three hours. No e-mail from Salon colleagues or from friends and,
most puzzling of all, no e-mail from the editor at the New York
Times with whom I'd been corresponding all morning about a freelance
piece I was writing for her. I gave her a call.

Turns out I'd never received several e-mails that she and other
Times staffers had sent me. A few tests proved that I was still
receiving e-mail from Salon addresses and a trickle of other
messages, but not getting Times e-mail wasn't going to fly. So I
poked around a bit more and found the e-mail address for Road
Runner's security department. And that's when I fell down a rabbit
hole into spam-blocker hell.

My e-mail of complaint to Road Runner security elicited an autoreply
that could have been composed by the Queen of Hearts from "Alice in
Wonderland":

"ATTENTION

PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE AUTORESPONSE IF YOU HAVE NEVER SENT MAIL
HERE BEFORE, OR EVEN IF YOU HAVE. THIS MESSAGE DETAILS INFORMATION
REQUIRED FOR US TO PROCESS YOUR REQUEST. IF YOU DID NOT INCLUDE THE
INFORMATION THAT WE REQUIRE, YOUR MESSAGE WILL BE DELETED WITHOUT
FURTHER REVIEW. YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE FURTHER COMMUNICATION FROM US
ASKING FOR INFORMATION."

The message went on to explain in somewhat confusing terms exactly
what this imperious personage demanded to see in order to deem my
existence worthy of notice. The upshot, though, was that anyone
whose e-mail to my Road Runner address was being blocked had to
contact Road Runner Security directly, sending a copy of the error
message they'd received when their e-mails to me bounced back.

I wasn't about to ask a busy newspaper editor to hassle with the
technical staff at my service provider, and I had a copy of
the "bounce" message from the spam blocker that she'd sent to my
Salon address. So I sent that off to Security with a note, hoping to
correct the situation without having to involve the Times.

But that's all I could do: hope. Suppose Security found the bounce
message I had sent insufficiently informative? What if the message
was adequate but the fact that it had been forwarded by me and not
by the original sender met with the disapproval of these faceless,
nameless, ALL-CAPS-spouting authorities? Off with its head! And I'd
never know that my message had been summarily executed. I would "NOT
RECEIVE FURTHER COMMUNICATION." My e-mail had gone to Camp X-Ray.

(http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/guantanamo-bay_x-
ray.htm)

I began to fret. Were there other people who'd sent me legitimate e-
mail that couldn't get through Road Runner's fascistic new spam
blockers? If they didn't have my phone number or one of my alternate
e-mail addresses, how could they let me know about it? What if
someone sent me an e-mail, got the bounce message in response, and
then decided that tracking me down was too much trouble? What if
that message was really, really important -- to me at least?

A couple of persistent souls managed to get word to me that their e-
mails had bounced back. Those e-mails were sent by 1) a venerable
publisher of trade magazines and 2) an even more venerable publisher
of books. Along with the New York Times, neither struck me as likely
culprits of spam abuse, but Salon's own tech staff explained that
they might seem to be, on account of something called relays used by
crafty spam perps looking to cover their tracks. So that meant that
anybody -- anybody -- might have their domain name hijacked by
spammers, then blocked by my service provider. And this could happen
at any time. Geez.

Several pleasant but not very effective Road Runner customer service
people explained to me that my only recourse was to ask these
senders to petition Road Runner for the removal of the scarlet S.
That meant asking the various senders for the names of their in-
house network administrators (providing they actually knew who this
was, not a given in large organizations), making sure each sender
forwarded a copy of Road Runner's bounce message to the
administrator, then contacting the administrator to ask that s/he
ask Road Runner to be taken off the spammer list.

Needless to say, this was a massive time suck. As the week drew to a
close, it seemed I'd frittered away almost half my work hours trying
to correct the mess and taking phone calls from Road Runner's
customer service people, who kept ringing up to ask if my concern
had been addressed, listen to my nth rant about the situation, and
then politely explain that they couldn't address my concern. This
was taking a whole lot more time than the simple act of deleting
unwanted spam -- and believe me, I get a lot of spam. And I still
couldn't be sure that I was getting all my legitimate mail.

No matter whom I managed to contact, I received robotically
identical responses explaining the necessity of spam filters and
reiterating that only Security could lift a block and only the
sender's network administrator could negotiate the unblocking. One
rep did slip me a special customer service address where I sent a
complaint about the inconvenience of the whole thing and suggested
that Road Runner's spam blockers might be a tad excessive. Someone
wrote back: "Our system has spam filters in place to protect our
network from being overloaded by bulk unsolicited e-mail. The end
result benefits our subscribers, who can expect less downtime and
higher service levels." When I suggested that the willy-nilly
blocking of perfectly legitimate e-mail necessary to one's
livelihood didn't really seem like a "higher service level" to me,
he replied that I shouldn't be using my e-mail account
for "commercial, or revenue generating purposes."

Somehow, my cheerful, speedy, efficient cable modem service had
morphed into evasive, officious martinets; Road Runner had turned
into Ari Fleischer. I was trying to speak up on behalf of the
unjustly stigmatized, but I was treated as if I were some kind of
soft-headed liberal spam lover. Didn't I understand how important it
was to protect the network? What were a few abused messages when the
greater good was at stake? And what was I doing getting that kind of
message, anyway? Broken, I reverted to using my Salon.com address as
my main account.

I have to admit that the policy of eradicating spam by blocking
nearly every message has a breathtaking ambition to it, even if it
pretty much eliminates the usefulness of e-mail altogether. Even so,
it doesn't work. There's still a handful of messages coming through
on my Road Runner address every day. And they're almost all spam.