How much SPAM do you tolerate before you become annoying?
Sometimes I feel companies go too far with their SPAM protection.
From: someone@
To: webmaster@
Dear webmaster, yesterday I was able to log into bugzilla, and today it sais my account is blocked because bugzilla can’t send me e-mail. Can you unlock my account and/or explain to me *why* my account was blocked?
From: webmaster@
To: someone@
Dear someone, your Bugzilla account was locked because Bugzilla cannot send you e-mail. The SPAM protection on your mail servers wants Bugzilla to verify it’s a valid sender, but Bugzilla cannot do that because it’s not a human.
From: someone’s mail server-reply-code-12345
To: webmaster@
You’re trying to send mail to someone@. We want to protect ourselves from 100% of SPAM, so please reply to this e-mail leaving the reply-code-12345 intact.
(Oh, good grief).
From: webmaster@
To: someone’s mail server-reply-code-12345
Yes, I’m human, this is valid, let me in!
From: someone@
To: webmaster@
That was easy, thanks for your help. Your address was confirmed. You can now feel better about the fact that your e-mail will reach my inbox quickly.
Thankfully, I don’t need to go through this hassle to reply to everyone that sends mail to webmaster@eclipse.org. I hope this person is enjoying a 100% SPAM-free Inbox, at the expense of everyone else’s time. I mean, I appreciate that your time is valuable, but mine is too, and there are other methods for preventing/reducing SPAM that are less intrusive — especially considering you mailed me first. In case it’s not obvious, the webmaster@eclipse.org address is not the most spam-protected mail address out on that there web, yet we manage it while remaining productive…
I had to rant.
Posted September 12th, 2007 by Denis Roy in category: Uncategorized
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2 Responses to “How much SPAM do you tolerate before you become annoying?”
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Bull Says:
September 12th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
I had the same experience setting up a conference paper submission system. People needed to register on-line in order to submit a paper to the conference, but the reply system would not format the subject line they way they liked it. They then complained that they could not register, and thus could not submit their paper. Naturally they were submitting at the deadline and I was supposed to be available to help at 3:00am on a Saturday morning.
Karl Matthias Says:
September 12th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Hey we just got one of these from ANOTHER user! I just stuffed it in the trash this time. Guess they’ll figure it out.