Email Filter Collateral Damage
In keeping with the current theme of ranting on existing anti-spam solutions, we’re seeing some interesting fall-out from spam filters. There’s apparently at least one filter in the wild that rejects messages if they are missing a MIME header. For non-geeks, a MIME header is a part of the email message header that specifies the type of content of an email message. If a message contains HTML, then the MIME header will specify that. If the message is an image, the MIME header will specify that.
There is nothing wrong with a message that does not include a MIME header. The content of the message is assumed to be text. But this filter labels all messages that don’t have these headers as spam. This is broken and illustrates one of the problems of anti-spam mail filters. Poorly designed filters, like this one, block many non-spam messages. Designing a workable filter is such an impossible task, that many programmers cheat and try to key off easy to identify aspects of a message. Which leads to stupidity like this.
And all this makes designing an Internet service that relies to some degree on email much more difficult than in years past.
Email Filter Collateral Damage In
October 25, 2002 by MarkF
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