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The Politics of Junk Filtering

If the national postal service, such as the Royal Mail in the UK, were to go through your letters and throw away all the stuff it considered to be junk instead of delivering it to you, you might be rather pleased until you discovered that it took a too liberal decision about what was junk. Catalogs you'd asked for? Junk! Requests from charities? Who needs them! Parcels from competing carriers? Toss them away! The possibility for abuse for an agency that was in a monopolistic position is just too scary to tolerate. After all, the postal service could charge 'consultancy fees' to any sender who wanted to guarantee that his stuff got delivered, or they could even farm this out to other companies. Because Microsoft Outlook is just about the only email client used by the international business community in the west, its' SPAM filter is the final arbiter as to what gets read. My Outlook 2007, set to the default settings, junks all the perfectly innocent email newsletters that I subscribe to. Whereas Google Mail, Yahoo, and LIVE are all pretty accurate in detecting spam, Outlook makes all sorts of silly mistakes. The documentation speaks techno-babble about 'advanced heuristics', but the result boils down to an inaccurate mess. The more that Microsoft fiddles with it, the stickier the mess. To make matters worse, it still lets through obvious spam. The filter is occasionally updated along with other automatic 'security' updates you opt for automatic updates. As an editor for a popular online publication that provides a newsletter service, this is an obvious source of frustration. We follow all the best-practices we know about. We ensure that it is a trivial task to opt out of receiving it. We format the newsletter to the requirements of the Service Providers. We follow up, and resolve, every complaint. As a result, it gets delivered. It is galling to discover that, after all that effort, Outlook then often judges the contents to be junk on a whim, so you don't get to see it. A few days ago, Microsoft published the PST file format specification, under pressure from a European Union interoperability investigation by ECIS (the European Committee for Interoperable Systems). The objective was that other applications could then access existing PST files so as to migrate from existing Outlook installations to other solutions. Joaquín Almunia, the current competition commissioner, should now turn his attention to the more subtle problems of Microsoft Outlook. The Junk problem seems to have come from clumsy implementation of client-side spam filtering rather than from deliberate exploitation of a monopoly on the desktop email client for businesses, but it is a growing problem nonetheless. Cheers, Michael Francis

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