Who Stole My Email?

by Bob Seidel

I like to write columns about the fun aspect of computing. But in today's world its difficult to ignore the dark side, and here is yet another topic that has surfaced. Sorry about that…

As you probably know, there is an ongoing war against spam email and similar invasions of your privacy. Many people receive huge amounts of spam email and as a result, there has been a lot of back-pressure against their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to fix the problem. And so the ISPs have responded. Many of them are now using commercial level spam fighting tools to intercept spam before it gets to you. But is this a good thing? Here is my story.

About a month ago, I noticed that I was getting a drastic reduction in the amount of spam I received. I wondered about this - I had certainly received no notice from my ISP that any change had been made. Of course, the less spam the better, I thought.

But I also noticed some other anomalies. Some of the newsletter-type emails that I receive were being reformatted - specifically that the type of the email was being changed from "html" to "txt". For the uninitiated, this means that instead of seeing the nice color and graphics, you would see just text characters. But the text characters contained html tags, and so could not actually be read easily.

I called my ISP about this, and they just frankly blew me away and said that the email was being sent that way by the source. But, I told them, that the email was coming from many different sources and that they all couldn't be bad. Their next answer was then that it must be my email program that was doing it.

I devised ever increasingly complex tests to illustrate to them that it was in fact their problem. I even determined the means by which the problem was occurring. But they kept blowing me off. I finally had to get a bit testy with them and found a tech that would investigate the problem. And, in fact, they did in the end it acknowledge that it was their problem.

What was going on? In order to fight spam, the ISP (and many other ISPs) had purchased commercial level programs to scan the flow of email through their servers and to delete those emails that are determined to be spam. In this case, the program went a step further, and would change the format of the email to text if it felt there was some potential for virus or other danger to your PC if you read it. The program is named Spam Assassin.

I am now locked in a battle with my ISP to get Spam Assassin turned off for my accounts.

In my investigation of the problem, another more serious issue has turned up. No spam detection scheme is perfect - mistakes are made. And when it makes a mistake, it can erase legitimate email. I found this out too, as people were reporting to me (via other means, of course) that their emails were not getting to me. I read that 17% of valid email is lost in that manner. Apparently, this is old news to AOL users, as AOL has been using spam filters for a long time.

So what do you do? Well, it's a tough question. If you let things continue as-is, you may run the chance of missing some email. I believe this will get better over time, but not perfect. If you ask your ISP to turn off this feature for you (if they can), you will be back to getting flooded with spam!

If it were me, I would take this step. I would rather use a local email spam filtering program and have the program move it in a folder where I can examine it later at lower priority. I check my filtered spam folders only once a day, and it's pretty easy to spot any legitimate emails mistakenly in there.

One thing you can do on sending email is to ensure that it is not mistaken as spam. Always fill in the Subject: field, and try to make the subject as personal as possible. For example, the subject "Hi!" sounds like spam, as does anything with the word Viagra in it!

I am sorry that I don't have a more positive answer for you on this one, but at least now you are better informed.

Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his web site at www.bobseidel.com, or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.