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Are Spam Blockers Too Strict?

America Online's controversial plan to charge mass e-mailers a fee to bypass their anti-spam system highlights the other, lesser-known, horn of the junk-e-mail problem: Filters that allegedly work too well.

At issue is the problem of "false positives," industry-speak for legitimate messages mistakenly filtered out by anti-spam software.

"If AOL or another ISP decides that someone's a spammer, then no e-mail from that individual gets through," said EFF attorney Cindy Cohn, whose group opposes the AOL plan. "But there's a fundamental difficulty at the heart of the spam debate: The only one who knows what you want delivered in your inbox is you."

For years, e-mail users complained that torrents of unwanted messages clogged their inboxes and crimped their productivity. Now, e-mail users, marketers and mailing list operators are more worried that spam filters are blocking out too many wanted messages.

AOL isn't the only company to face charges that it improperly blocks legitimate messages. But, as the world's largest ISP for years, it has long borne the brunt of complaints from mass e-mailers over the problem.

Ken Schneider, chief architect with Symantec, which sells spam-filtering tools used by most large U.S. internet service providers, says false positive rates are actually much lower than the Jupiter research indicates. It's hard to get an exact figure, however, because determining what qualifies as spam is a matter of opinion. What marketers call "false positives" may be messages that aren't technically spam, but nonetheless do not contain information that end users want.

"There's a very gray notion of what's spam and what's not," Schneider said.

A particularly troublesome gray area, Schneider said, involves affiliate marketers. These marketers often send e-mails to people who signed up on a website with whom the affiliate has a marketing agreement. The recipient of the e-mail, however, probably isn't aware of the arrangement and has no idea why they're receiving the message.

Meanwhile, the amount of obvious spam getting blocked is high as ever. Last Monday, AOL estimated it had blocked 1.4 billion spam e-mails by late afternoon. Schneider estimates that two-thirds of all e-mail sent today is spam.

"Personally I'm much more concerned about missing a few legitimate messages than figuring out what to delete," Sorkin said.

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