Thursday, September 13, 2007

I'm not a spammer!

Grrr. Suddenly, everyone thinks I'm a spammer. All e-mails I send to Comcast, MSN, and Hotmail addresses are bouncing back to me:
"...sender was rejected.Remote host said: 550 Your e-mail was rejected for policy reasons on this gateway. Reasons for rejection may be related to content with spam-like characteristics or IP/domain reputation problems." and "...BL004 Blocked for spam"

I have not spammed anyone. This is another instance of technology failing us. Something in a software program somewhere is "detecting" behaviors and taking action based on that. So, I can't e-mail several of my friends or web site visitors tonight because of that software. Grrr.

In some past instances my e-mail address was blocked because I was sending out the RootsWeb mailing list posts to the CyndiList mailing list each day. Every once in a while RootsWeb mailing lists get tagged as possible spam, but this is the first time that my personal address has been tagged that way. I'm a bit irritated. I can't figure out how to resolve this. I've e-mailed my ISP. I've tried to e-mail Hotmail. I posted a request on Comcast. But I wonder if those are the right things to do. We'll see.

3 comments:

Randy said...

I'm not sure technology is failing us. Sounds more like Comcast, etc. are failing us.

Cyndi Ingle said...

Randy - you're right. I guess I should have said that the technology being used by the people running Comcast, Qwest, and anyone else trying to automagically tag spammers is failing us. It is always the people behind the technology, not the technology itself. I have a big problem with software that is supposed to do things like this, without human intervention. On one hand, we need something automated to do the work because of the immensity of the problem with junk mail and spamming. On the other hand, there isn't yet a pretty software solution and that means that errors will be made. The thing that really bothered me in this instance was how hard it was to figure out how to communicate with someone and get this fixed. It was almost impossible to figure out how to report the problem. As of today the problem seems to be gone, so I'm not sure who fixed it -- my own ISP or the others.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I used to be accused of spamming people also, and that was back when I first accessed the Internet with one of those first-out WebTV Classic units, where I received a message saying hello to me from someone, then, when I replied back to everyone, I was accused of "mass-Mailing" their e-mail addresses.

So after that, I only used BCC: to "Blind-Carbon-Copy" people, if I e-mail more than one person at a time, so their e-mail addresses weren't "spread" to others.

I also said to them that I was sorry about both things, but I also told them that I had originally thought that they were all friends and were giving me an "invitation" to their group.

I didn't mean to spam them, nor did I mean to "mass-mail" their e-mail addresses.

Later on I picked up a 386, then a 486, then a Pentium-II etc and got rid of the two 286's I had, so I could have a computer capable of installing or running Windows, instead of DOS I used before and to access the Internet with.

So, now I'm much more careful on who I e-mail, plus even when sending to my friends, family and relatives, I use the BCC: to send them "blindly" so I've gotten into the habit more or less, so I don't ever share one e-mail address with another without their permission first.

If you're wondering how I do that, e-mail multiple people, using BCC: to hide their e-mail addresses, I set up a contact of "Undisclosed Recipient," using my own e-mail address as the e-mail address.

This of course means that I'll receive a copy of the sent e-mail.

Have a Great Day,
Bernard