WebProNews

20%? Hah! That's only the tip of the iceberg.

The main trouble with the email issues is that, unlike government agencies, Email Service Providers (ESPs) have no regulations to follow. As a result, they do as they please with our emails. With the increasing dependency on email in our day-to-day lives, this is completely intolerable. And, considering the sophistication of today's programming, utterly unnecessary.

Businesses, especial ISPs offer "free" email service. But they do this to encourage traffic to their site, not because they truly wish to provide an honest service. So they take the position that their service is only for non-commercial use and they have every right to filter out (i.e., DELETE) emails "at their own discretion" (i.e., without consulting the recipient).

Trouble is, their tactics are at best faulty and at worst highly questionable. They employ tools such as trigger filters (a long list of words that will designate an email as spam), spam assassins' lists (unregulated companies that, while well-intended, do not check up on reported sites), and arbitrary testing, all of which move emails to the spam folder or delete them entirely.

AND, it should be noted, that once a piece of email is placed IN a spam folder, IF it's deleted by the recipient, they will never receive another email from that sender.

Trouble is, they do this without the recipient's knowledge. AND, systems such as Gmail will "test" emails arbitrarily-- sending approved, wanted emails to the spam folder for no good reason at all. If you don't check through the list of emails IN the spam folder daily, as often as you check your email, you are likely to lose wanted emails without ever realizing why.

Yet, we all continue to receive spam in our inboxes. Clearly the methods currently employed do NOT work. And with the ever-increasing sophistication of programs, there is no reason why a better system cannot be used.

If you don't think this is important, you should know that I've seen good, honest companies (who followed zero-tolerance spam policies), destroyed because of these regulations. In my more paranoid moments, I even think that the tactics employed by ESPs are a way to destroy independent competition... most of them ARE run by large corporations, after all.

Tracker Mo
P.S. I have posted much more on this topic on my blog.