It is Wednesday again and time for my monthly tirade. When did sending an email to someone or not reaching them on the phone constitute legally apprising them of a contractual issue? There is a reason that email systems have a receipt or receipt requested feature (for that one person in the back, you can request notification that someone has received a specific email from you). Successful communication, to me, means you sent a message AND received acknowledgment of receipt and understanding of the message (ACK and NACK in computerese).
As I said last week, this is the time of year when I am renewing contracts with service providers for some of my clients (and some services I use as well). One of my providers claims to have been trying to get word to me all month (January) that the terms of use for some services I use have changed and some of my sites are not in compliance with the new regulations. Now, understand, they have two phone numbers for me plus an emergency contact number, in case of phone problems, and all my phone numbers have voice mail systems that have been continuously up and fully functional all month in addition to being one of a very few that have my private email address and yet they did not actually get any message to me until Monday; after I pointed out to them that some websites were not working correctly.
I dutifully pulled and scanned the transaction logs for all of my email addresses, and sure enough, they had sent me an email last Friday, that immediately went into the junk folder based on its content and NOT from a recognized addressee. It seems that they have hired a third party to negotiate with grandfathered in clients who have long-standing contracts such as mine that no longer fit with their notion of an ideal client. These folks are really good at coding emails and this one was lovely with some nice graphics, 5 or more links to outside sources, a few phone numbers, etc. In short, the spam filter immediately recognized it as spam and dealt with it appropriately.
So, notes about spam and spam rules. most email clients and some of the better webmail clients have a dual verification system for junk mail (sorry, wanted to use both junk mail and spam because the email clients use those words interchangeably). Part 1 is to check and see if the sender is in your address book (this is not your whitelist, but can function as one if you turn this feature on); if the sender is in your address book, you can have the email allowed even if it contains suspicious content. Part 2 is to score the email based on its content; a number of factors come into play, how many people is it sent to (more recipients means more likely spam) does it contain graphics that are not identified (a photo carefully tagged as company logo or mountain cottage is fine, one with no tag adds to the spam likelihood score)(a graphic tagged “get your viagra here” gets a really high score), does it contain links (lots of links means a high spam score), do the links point to known “No No” sites (guaranteed spam). After this and other factors are considered; a high spam score gets the email treated as spam and a low score allows it to pass into your inbox.
In addition, some email clients (Thunderbird, Outlook webmail, Microsoft Outlook, Google mail) have the ability to learn what kind of emails you consider as spam (junk mail). This feature takes some time and effort on the user’s part but can be very helpful; the intelligence in these features can see similarities when a spammer is changing their outgoing address, recognize similar addresses, servers, businesses, etc. It may take a month or more of the user identifying emails as spam (and as not spam) but I have been impressed with the results once you get enough information into the system.