![]() Our mail error logs indicate over 2,500 TidBITS issues were rejected by over 1,000 sites because they contained the drug’s name many of the rejections were from relatively high-profile sites like the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and VeriSign. Jeff Carlson’s article on the Palm i705 in TidBITS-635 made a passing reference to a well-known Pfizer drug for men, technically known as sildenafil citrate. Them’s Spam-Fighting Words! What causes some email systems to misinterpret TidBITS as spam or malicious email? I can’t be specific here – or thousands of subscribers will never receive this TidBITS issue! – but I can point to some recent examples: In short, we’re starting to see signs that email, often hailed as the Internet’s "killer app," is in danger of becoming an unreliable, arbitrarily censored medium – and there’s very little we can do about it. Over time, inaccurate filtering will substantially reduce the general utility of email. That filtering is often being done without the knowledge or consent of affected users These email systems are utterly wrong – TidBITS is never sent to any address that has not subscribed, and an issue of TidBITS has never contained a worm or virus – but they serve to highlight some interesting points:Įmail is increasingly being filtered for its content The reason for these errors is that from time to time, some email systems conclude that TidBITS is spam or – worse – an email-borne worm or virus. On the heels of these errors, we usually receive a flurry of complaints: "Why didn’t I get this week’s issue?" or "Please fix my subscription – I didn’t get TidBITS today but your system says I’m still on the list!" In the last year or so, we’ve noticed a new trend: some weeks, we get errors from hundreds (or even thousands) of subscribers whose servers refuse delivery of TidBITS issues. Different lists have different removal criteria: it might take four to eight weeks of errors for an address to be removed from the main TidBITS list (which only sends a message once a week), while addresses would be removed from a discussion list like TidBITS Talk more quickly (although a higher number of errors would be required). ![]() Basically, a custom tool I wrote ferrets out bouncing email addresses from the collection of bounces we receive each week, determining whether an address is eligible for removal based on the number and types of errors that come back over a particular period. I briefly outlined TidBITS’s bounce management process in "Not Your Grampa’s Mailing List" back in TidBITS-420, and although some of the details have changed, the idea remains the same. And it’s necessary work: Internet access providers regularly shut down, are acquired, and change their names and – if our experience is any indicator – people simply abandon (or are forced to abandon) email addresses far more often than they unsubscribe from mailing lists. I can’t claim there are no undeliverable addresses on our mailing lists – that’s an impossible goal – but we try to run a tight ship. We consider maintaining "clean" mailing lists part of running an email-based publication responsibly: just as we don’t want to send TidBITS to people who don’t want it, we don’t want to waste bandwidth, effort, or time (for us or anyone else) trying to deliver TidBITS to addresses which aren’t accepting it. One of the things I handle behind the scenes for TidBITS is bounce management: the tedium of figuring out which addresses should be removed from our various mailing lists due to delivery errors. #1627: iPhone 14 lineup, Apple Watch SE/Series 8/Ultra, new AirPods Pro, iOS 16 and watchOS 9 released, Steve Jobs Archive.#1628: iPhone 14 impressions, Dark Sky end-of-life, tales from Rogue Amoeba.#1629: iOS 16.0.2, customizing the iOS 16 Lock Screen, iPhone wallet cases, meditate for free with Oak.#1630: Apple Books changes in iOS 16, simplified USB branding, recovering a lost Google Workspace account.#1631: iOS 16.0.3 and watchOS 9.0.2, roller coasters trigger Crash Detection, Medications in iOS 16, watchOS 9 Low Power Mode.
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