MediaPost’s “Just an Online Minute” generally publishes some reasonably thought-provoking opinions, but last week’s piece by normally solid Wendy Davis made us wonder if some zany Utah legislator [zany Utah legislator being triply redundant] didn’t body-snatch Davis on the way to work and write under her byline.
In the article, Davis used recent e-mail delivery problems due to overly aggressive spam filters at Verizon and AOL as an excuse to call for lawmakers to get more involved in electronic communications.
“For now, there are plenty of watchdogs to alert the ISPs, and the public, as to wrongly blocked e-mail,” Davis wrote. “But consumer vigilance can only extend so far. Ultimately, it will be up to lawmakers and the courts to hold ISPs accountable for giving consumers the services they’re paying for—which include, at a minimum, the ability to send and receive information online.”
Representatives of Yahoo and AOL at the E-mail Deliverability Bootcamp in Chicago on April 18 said that 90% of the billions of messages they process every day is spam.
Given the sheer volume of the problem, punishing ISPs with legal action for the occasional deliverability mistake is certainly not the answer. Legal hassles would only divert resources away from the real issue.
Instead, people should be applauding ISPs for the bang-up job they’ve done at wading through 17 miles of crap every day and still getting such a high percentage of wanted e-mail delivered for so little money.
