Sent as an open letter to Dan Gillmor at the San Jose Mercury News, the most reliable source I know in the Valley:
I thought this might be of interest as a tech trend for you to write about. And I’d welcome your advice.
Verio, our ISP and web host, has just implemented spam controls. That’s good.
My email volume has dropped 50-80%. That’s good… and bad, since I fear they’ve blocked lots of ‘false positives,’ and there’s no way to know, and there’s no way to create a “white list” of acceptable senders.
[Why do I fear their false positives? Because their ‘medium probability’ spam (which they pass through with ‘[SPAM]’ inserted into the subject line) includes lots of false positives, so I’m worried that there ‘high probability’ includes even more.]
Their policy, such as it is, is detailed here: http://www.verio.com/support/view_article.cfm?doc_id=4157 (which link I only got after an increasingly frustrated call with tech support; they didn’t notify users this was coming)
I wonder: is this the way most ISPs are handling the spam problem, providing no recourse to white list, no way to adjust their filters, etc? Or is it time to move to another service?
(I know full well what a problem spam is for them as well as for us, but it makes it hard for me to run a business if might have important incoming email blocked, and not even know it’s happened.)
