The Innocent Victims of Spam Filters

Yesterday’s Hartford Courant had an interesting article about spam filters. The author talks about his experience with a newsletter he publishes. Before he sent the latest issue he decided to run it through some spam checking software. When it told him his newsletter was highly likely to be flagged as spam found out some surprising and somewhat disturbing information:

          I contacted the company that distributes my newsletter, and a staff member explained that three sets of words among the issue’s many articles could derail my e-mail: a reference to “young adult,” a common classification for books intended for adolescent readers; a sentence in my editorial — “Speaking of legal matters, it’s getting nasty out there” — referring to the growing number of lawsuits; and a distinguished biographer’s discussion of writing a book for children that included the following comment: “At my public library I queried the children’s division librarian — what works, what does not, who is ‘hot.’ ” The inclusion of “young adult,” “getting nasty” and “hot” was like poison. Indiscriminate spam-blocking software would spot those words, ignore the context and group my newsletter with unsolicited e-mails from purveyors of smut.

This leads to an important question. Where is the line drawn between spam filtering and censorship? We all can agree that spam is a huge problem and that spam filters are necessary, but do they go too far? It certainly explains why legit mail so often ends up in our spam folders or not delivered at all. A gardening newsletter discussing hot peppers and perhaps announcing a tour of a herb farm risks being flagged because it contains the words “hot” and “farm”. A friend telling you about a nasty fall her mom took and how her neighbor Dick drove them to the hospital risks the same thanks to the words “nasty” and..well you get the idea.

This problem seems similar to the one that happened with “Net Nanny” and similar parental control programs. Sites about breast cancer, the Holocaust, and woman’s rights were all routinely blocked. Now such censorship is reaching our inboxes and the solution is not as simple as uninstalling a program. Has the war on spam come down to what is the lesser of two evils? It appears so.