I remain amazed at how major ISPs and E-Mail providers can use spam filters that are so (to put it far more nicely than I’d like) primitive. Over the past week or two, the biggest challenge I’ve had business-wise is telling people that previews of their letters are ready for them to view. I send an E-Mail. It gets blocked. They send an E-Mail wondering why they haven’t heard back from me. I can’t very well tell them to add me to their whitelist, because they won’t get it.

So, instead, I have to take advantage of the fact that the filters are so primitive, and work around them to get my message through. But that’s rather time-consuming, and not something I should (in my opinion) have to be doing. Why do E-Mail providers insist on using tactics akin to blocking all telephone numbers in California because one or two companies do unwanted telemarketing? Especially if the companies doing the telemarketing are actually in Wisconsin, breaking the telephone protocol to make it look like they’re really coming from California so that it’s harder to trace them.

Don’t they understand that they’re doing exactly what the more malicious spammers want — disrupting legitimate communications, rendering the medium increasingly useless? There is good spam filtering available that doesn’t use such draconian tactics, and it’s not hard to set up.