By now I'm sure that you've had it happen to you: you are expecting an email message as a result of ordering something, emailing somebody, or simply answering a question on a website. So you wait for the expected email, and you wait, and you wait, and wait, and.... You get the idea. I'm finding this happening to me more and more. And the reason is the war against SPAM.
To a large extent, users blame their service provider for SPAM just like we blame the post office or the mail carrier for the junk mail stuffed into our mailbox. Especially if the SPAM is rank or offensive, we blame the service provider. After all, can't they see that it's crap? Well, yes and no. And therein lies the problem.
Service providers have to develop or purchase filters to sort out the bad email from the good. Some of the earliest ones used a word filter but those tended to block out valid email that might refer to breast cancer but not stop an offensive missive with s*e*x all over it. Providers developed white lists of senders who are always to be let through and black lists of senders who are never to be let in. I believe my email is actually subject to three levels of black and white lists - service provider wide, user lever, and Microsoft Outlook level. How confusing is that. And now that SPAM senders can forge sending addresses they make their obnoxious messages look like they're coming from your best friends or even from yourself. Your service provider then tries to filter out those messages and suddenly you're cut off from you circle of friends.
Fortunately, I get a chance to see the black lists at the Outlook and user level but I have to periodically scan through the blocked messages. The last time I did I found several messages from family members and some from services I had requested. In their zeal to protect me from obnoxious messages, my provider has censored my mail obnoxiously. What is the answer?
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