Friends,

After sending out last night's email news, it became clear that the fight against spam (don't get me wrong--I despise spam and we get alot of it) has taken a turn for the worse.

At an alarming rate, ISPs are instituting filters that use buggy technology because they need to block unwanted email. Unfortunately, the side effect of this is that you are also not getting the email that you DO want. Much like the software that is used on computers in libraries and it's inability to distinguish a site like Bodies against a porn site, this is the same concept (yes, in many libraries, or if you have child-safe filtering software on your own computer you cannot access Bodies Like Ours because we talk about things like genitals here). It doesn't matter if you signed up to get email from us, or wrote us, if your ISP doesn't know us, you don't get it in many cases.

The other aspect of these filters is that because we use our web site's email server to send email, it also gets blocked by many of these overzealous ISP filters. The don't recognize us because we are not in with the big conglomerates and so they think you don't want to hear from us. Your ISP may be filtering your email.

AOL filters your emails. We have one member who obviously hasn't gotten any of our emails over the past few weeks. I keep writing back telling her I am sure I wrote back and resending the sent message but it never gets to her. I am sure there are many more who wonder why they never heard back from Bodies Like Ours. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing if these emails were received because our server shows they were delivered. They go out the pipe and fall into a black hole, courtesy of over-zealous email filters put on your account for "your own good" by your ISP.

If your ISP has a filter on your email account, you need to speak up to them and tell them you want your email! This isn't only a Bodies issue, but it's impacting many organizations.

You sign up for an news_list and then never get anything? You can blame your ISP. You write to an organization, and never hear anything back; blame your ISP.

Here is what you will find on some of our pages because of this bad software being deployed by ISPs who only have your best interest in mind (sound familiar?)

A note about email communication from Bodies Like Ours:

Many ISP's have drastically changed the way their email filters work in recent weeks. While the intent of these filters is good (lessening spam) many smaller organizations inadvertantly get caught in their over-reaching web.

AOL particularly has taken to filtering out most email that is sent from Bodies Like Ours, both from our email list and personal communication. This is a problem for many businesses and organizations trying to send to AOL accounts. Even if you choose to receive email that you sign-up for, AOL has determined that you shouldn't receive it. We, as a small organization are unable to deal with this on our end.You will need to bring this issue up yourself with AOL. If you contact us from an AOL account, do not expect a response as the odds are only about 50/50 based upon experiences of the past few weeks.

Additionally, some ISPs, Earthlink most notably, have instituted a challenge-response mechanism on behalf of their account holders. If you have this enabled, you will no longer receive most email communication from Bodies Like Ours, and many other smaller organizations that you have chosen to receive information from. Again, this is something that we do not have the resources to fight or deal with. If you wish to receive email from organizations such as Bodies Like Ours, please address that with your ISP. We simply do not have the resources to do this nor respond to the whims of each filter setting.

While the goals of these filters are admirable, they are unfortunately overreaching and will likely lead to the end of email as a form of easy communication.

For more information about this situation, please read the following article:

Spam Blockers May Wreak Email Havoc

Betsy

__________________
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. --Margaret Mitchell

A friend of mine wrote the spam filters for his/my ISP. Most are designed to screen out specific words or phrases, as you indicated. Most can, however, also "whitelist" selected sources of email or certain phrases. (A whitelist automatically lets certain email through the filter.) So if you ask your ISP to whitelist messages with the word 'bodieslikeours' in them, it should fix the problem.

The spam problem is huge, so please don't blame the ISP for trying to do something about it. My ISP blocks over 200,000 messages a DAY before they even gets to users, and my personal email filters will often see another 50-100 per day which get caught.

Glenn, who's been too busy to post much