The Worst False-Positive: Emergency Email

Civil Defense groups sent email to thousands of people last year in Florida, warning them to get out of the area. A hurricane was on its way.

AOL's spam email filter intercepted the email. Apparently it matched similar patterns that were previously used to tout male potency products.

Over 4,000 people had signed up to be warned of such events. A good portion of them were never informed about the on-coming storm. AOL's spam prevention systems apparently knew better.

For the time being, email is clearly no longer a reliable tool. If you really want to get someone an important message, you may need to rely on other methods like the post-office. On the other hand, maybe that's not a great idea either.

Personally, I like not being able to be reliably reached. If something's really important I'll probably figure it out myself. On the flip side, the first time I find out that Chile has the nuclear bomb, may be a mushroom cloud over Seattle.

SpamButcher can act as an Outlook spam filter, or work with most other email clients such as Thunderbird.

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