Spam Filter Blues

Have you ever heard the saying, "A good apple gone bad?"


I think it typically applies to humans but in this case, I'm going to talk about Spam Filters. I know that there are a lot of annoying people out there who create questionable emails and somehow blast it out to the universe expecting someone to go, "Oh, hey I've always wanted to buy vitamins from an unknown resource, I think I'll click through." Or worse yet, "I've always wanted to enlarge my XYZ [you get the picture], maybe I should get this."


Who the heck purchases that stuff anyway? I don't know. But thank goodness our server companies have spent countless hours and millions of dollars trying to prevent that gross stuff from arriving in our inboxes.


But somewhere in our over-zealousness at protection we have gone too far and even the good stuff can't get through! Ay carumba. Here are a couple of ways that our over-zealous spam protection is costing me now:


- My graphic designer couldn't receive emails from ANYONE with a successconnections.com address for 2 weeks. She had no idea we had asked her to start a project and so we were over 2 weeks behind on a critical project. Very painful!


The fix? She had to manually call her server company and "white list" all of our domain names. Even though her server company told her repeatedly that there were no problems this was the only thing that worked.


- My good friend and internet marketing colleague tried repeatedly to email me for weeks. It was about a joint venture we had discussed and she could not get her email out. In desperation, she finally had to have her assistant call me (that was probably about a $40 phone call) and get the message to me.


The fix? We don't know yet. Apparantely they have some spam server issues with their system they are trying to get fixed.


I could go on and on but you get the point. I guess I'm just a bit peeved that these "yahoos" are out there screwing up the system for the rest of us legit businesses.


Here are a couple of pointers though:


Be careful when you report spam. If you use Yahoo, AOL, MSN or any of the free email services and report "spam" email, be sure it isn't something you signed up for and forgot about. It can take months for a internet business to clear their name off a black list. It's better if you just "unsubscribe."


White list preferred email senders. If you sign up for a valuable ezine, online product or even have a friend you want to talk with via email, take 2 minutes and "white list" them as an approved email. Your email provider should have a link or instructions on how to do that.


Follow these steps to identify the real problem. If you can't get an email from someone, isolate the problem. My virtual webmaster, Adam Hommey, put together this trouble shooting process for us:

• Identify the e-mail address they are trying to send to


• Save the "bounceback" message and fax or email to your webmaster or email server company.


• Identify the IP address(es) of the local internet connection of the person (s) having the problem (go to http://www.dnsstuff.com/ and look up the multi-part number displayed along the top of the screen)