PlusNet anti-spam - a cautionary tale...

Like many others for several weeks now I have been seeing a lot of spam emails getting through without the [SPAM] marker, but last night I had something much worse.

My family sent me a couple of emails containing Amazon vouchers and for some reason they were both very efficiently marked as [SPAM]. Now fortunately I look at all my spams before I delete them, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how this could have been disasterous. How on earth does perfectly legitimate email get marked as spam when very obvious spam is being missed on a regular basis (for me more is being missed than is being caught).

I would strongly recommend that nobody relies on the PlusNet filter for auto deletion as if I had it would have cost me twenty quid.

Spam is a difficult challenge for any IT department. You would not believe the amount that tries to enter my works network. As with most things the more you pay the better results you tend to get. There are online EMail hosters who will charge you for the service but you would hope will give you a better service. I have not used any ISP's free EMail service for a long time now as they tend to be unreliable and subject to problems. But then again they are free and are a good service if they work for you.

In reply to:

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My family sent me a couple of emails containing Amazon vouchers and for some reason they were both very efficiently marked as [SPAM]. Now fortunately I look at all my spams before I delete them, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how this could have been disasterous. How on earth does perfectly legitimate email get marked as spam when very obvious spam is being missed on a regular basis (for me more is being missed than is being caught).

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Fairly obviously. The chief aim in life of a spam moron is to make his mails look legit enough to creep in under the spam filter. Which means that everyone else tries harder to avoid false negatives - increasing the risk as you have found, of false positives.

Face it, the spam morons have broken email quite conclusively, to the extent that it is no longer reliable, certainly for conveying monetary value.

And ironically enough this response was marked as [SPAM] when it reached my email although the reply from darkhorizon472 was not. Random or what?

I guess these things work by some sort of scoring method. So somehow a title of "Kate and the rest of us!!! sent you an Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificate!" sent from a bona fide Amazon email address somehow scores more spam points than an email titled "MelvaPhallusObvious" from a made up email address containing a link to "GargantuanPenisOlive".

pitnicker says that the spam morons have broken email and he may be right, but there seems to be some design problems with the anti-spam software too. If I were PlusNet I don't think I would consider their solution to be worth the money they pay for it.

This is why they will be switching everyone to Postini in the New Year which appears to be much more effective from my experience as an early adopter

That will be because I am the fountain of all knowledge and always speak the truth

(see if the spam filter stops this one !!)