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2. ~~ FEATURE ARTICLE ~~
" Is Your ISP Censoring You? "  by The Pencil Dude
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Dear Subscribers,

I’d like to be able to say that I’ve discovered a great new
weapon against SPAM.  This system boasts a 99.94% success rate
in keeping the trash out of your inbox.  Sounds Great! Instead
of rejoicing though, I’m choked, angry, miffed, livid and a bit
depressed.  The latest tool in the spam wars is called Spam
Assassin, and it’s coming to an Internet Service Provider,
(ISP), near you.

Spam Assassin is an email filtering system that scans your
email’s headers and the body of the email for offending clues,
keywords, phrases and patterns.  This by the way is  the basis
of any filtering system.  Many ISP’s and email providers today
are offering some sort of spam filter system, and this I think
is a good thing.  Hey, I sure could use a little less spam in my
inbox, that’s for sure.  The problem is, Spam Assassin in
particular makes a lot of assumptions and is not a very
realistic filtering system.  I doubt their success rate, but
then again, their standard of what is and what isn’t spam is
totally different from mine.

For instance, I compared a recent personal email from a friend
against their spam test.  I was shocked to learn that it would
have failed to get through, if my ISP or web host had this
system installed.  At a score of 9 points, my friend’s personal
email had failed by 4 points.

A quick calculation of the last issue of this ezine, scored over
72 points.  I stopped counting at that point, as it was getting
ugly and pointless.  In order for this ezine to pass a Spam
Assassin scan, it would require a lot of changes to my use of
language, punctuation AND some important information that is
necessary for the smooth administration of any newsletter.

It’s even worse for those of us who publish a business and
marketing newsletter, as there is no way our content can satisfy
the spam censor.  According to these developers; money,
marketing and profit are EVIL.  In case you were wondering, yes,
they do give this software away for free.

How am I supposed to tell you how to subscribe or unsubscribe
and provide you with a way to do so?  Spam Assassin docks points
off for that.  I get points off if I provide an email address, I
get points off if I provide an URL.

If I want to offer you something free, (Like oh maybe - Spam
Assassin), I can’t because there’s no such thing as a freebie.

If I want to format my text in a certain way, I can’t because
the makers of Spam Assassin have decided that is spam or an
indication of spam.

If you ask me for information, I have to use a "Real Name".
Company names or names such as "Support", "Information", and
"Sales Department", (whoops double whammy there), are no-no’s.

But what about you?  How does this directly affect you?

Let’s start with the simple part... You won’t receive your
favorite newsletters, ezines, jokes of the day, news from the NY
Times - THEY ALL FAIL. 

Like to send interesting web pages to your friends?  Forget it,
not if you or your friend is being protected by Spam Assassin.
Do you use a background color in your email, other than white?
Do you use spaces in between your words in the subject line of
your email?
That_is_not_allowed_you_have_to_use_underscores_instead!  Oops,
sorry but exclamation and question marks in the subject line get
you docked too.

So how wide-spread is this madness?  It’s hard to say.  It would
appear that it is indeed a popular filter right now.  One of the
things that fuels it’s popularity, is that it’s freely available
open source software.   Anyone can download it and install it
onto their server or even their personal linux computer AND
modify it.  It’s not Windows or Mac software.

I checked with my ISP, (Shaw.ca), and their tech support
department stated that spam filtering is left to the individual
user.  The only time that they would implement a system wide
block, would be if they were notified of a major virus or worm
attack.  My Web Hosting company, (Baremetal.com), assured me
that they have no intention of installing this particular
software.  They also stated that should they install something
similar they would ask their users first.

A check around the Net, turned up a mixed bag of information.
The first ISP that I found using these particular filters was a
medium sized provider in the western states.  They’ve taken the
position of monitoring how the filters work.  They’ve also
notified their users that they can request to be excluded, and
that their filters can be adjusted.  This was encouraging to
see.  A company concerned about both sides of the issue.

Another ISP that I ran across, offered the option of letting the
individual user control  the settings.  The trouble with that
though, is that you would have to be familiar with linux command
line programming. 

A different ISP offered the option of using Spam Assassin or
not.  They also warned though that if you chose to have the
filter enabled, then you could count on not having spam.  But,
that you could also count on not knowing if any legitimate email
had been deleted in the process.

As for the other half-dozen ISP’s that I found; they didn’t
offer, (at least publicly), an option to opt-out of having Spam
Assassin filter their email accounts.

End thoughts...

I would love some sort of effective spam filter.  The problem is
that the use of the current filtering systems need to follow
some better guidelines that don’t penalize businesses.  The
filtering rules also need to be realistic.  Users must be made
aware of the spam filters that their ISP or e-mail providers use
and the users need to be aware that their actions or inaction’s
will result in default filters being applied.  I found out the
hard way that my own zine was being trashed by my hotmail
account until I specifically added my ezine’s email address to
the exclude list.   All in all, there’s just no easy answers.