Why is [SPAM] appended to my subject line?
The University of Kentucky listserv computer uses the Can-It spam filtering system to reduce unsolicited commercial e-mail (a.k.a., “spam”). This system runs an analysis of every incoming email and does one of three things:
- Lets the message pass unmolested.
- Marks the message as [SPAM] to warn the recipient that the system thinks the message might be spam
- Blocks the message altogether because the system is sure that the message is spam (more on this later).
Classics-L’s list owner receives a large volume of spam from online marketers who have automated systems that search the World Wide Web for e-mail addresses and send their multiple copies of their offers of counterfeit timepieces, bodily enhancements, and mortgages to any e-mail address they find, regardless of how appropriate those offers may be. Some of these e-mails are addressed to the list, and would be posted if the “from” address in the email were that of a subscriber (which it very well could be; the “from” address in an email is as arbitrary as the return address of a traditional letter, and spammers often try to find e-mail addresses that are associated with one another on the same site to use precisely to fool filtering and subscriptions systems). Others are addressed to the classics-l-request address, which is used by non-subscribers to request that announcements be posted to the list, and by subscribers to request help.
The spam filter on Classics-L not only protects the list and list owners from unwanted mail, it also protects the listserv software (which does all the work of checking each posting to make sure the poster is a subscriber, copying valid postings to each subscriber, and formatting these outgoing emails according to subscriber’s preferences, as well as maintaining the subscriber list) from being overwhelmed by irrelevant traffic.
Unfortunately, the spam filter is not perfect: determining what is and what is not wanted e-mail is a very difficult task, and even human intelligence cannot flawlessly make this determination according to another’s preferences. This means that many times e-mails are marked as [SPAM] when they are actually desired by subscribers, and occasionally even unnecessarily blocked. Usually, spam filters allow the recipient to tune their preferences so that they can gradually refine the filtering mechanism and prevent mischaracterization. To complicate matters, the University of Kentucky system is not tunable by the Classics-L list owner or other administrators, and only by University of Kentucky information systems personnel, so practically speaking there’s not much to be done to refine the spam filter’s results.
The most common effects of the spam filter are messages misidentified as spam on the subject line, missing messages (on rare occasions), messages received out of order (because one message takes much longer to analyze than another), intermittent delays (sometimes because the filtering software is being maintained, sometimes because it is being overwhelmed by spam), and responses that you do not have permission to post when you are a subscriber (because the spam filter has misidentified you as a chronic spammer, usually due to the internet protocol address currently assigned to your computer having been used by a chronic spammer in the past).
