Spam Filters, Scam Busters and Traction Control

I just got my daily server monitoring report via email. It was a rough day - and we had a little downtime. It seems someone's malfunctioning hyper-fast download thingy was causing our main server some grief. Still, we managed about 99.8% uptime with the backup server automatically kicking-in. Not too bad for an off-day.

But, that's not what's eating me. It's that my email client, "ThunberBird" is trying to be my mom.

"ThunderBird thinks this message might be an email scam."

Good for you ThunderBird. It's nice to know you think my server uptime report is a scam.

Now how do I turn this annoying "feature" off? As far as I can tell - I can't*.

It offers a "Not a Scam" button - that I've clicked before - but it seems to make no difference.

The issue is very similar to Exchange 2003's, "Intelligent Message Filter." You can tell it to be less-aggressive (a setting of 9) or more aggressive (a setting of 1) - but there's no obvious way to entirely disable it.

Would it have been hard to include a, "please, Mr. Computer, don't filter anything" checkbox? There seems to be a registry hack to resolve the issue - but that's not the point.

The situation ironically, makes the "Intelligent Message Filter" pretty dumb.

What does a spam email stopper setting of 1 to 9 really mean? I have the newly-deployed Exchange server I administer set all the way "down" to 9. What would make a lot more sense is a setting of 0 to 10 - in which 10 is most aggressive and 0 is disabled entirely.

The frustration reminds me of reading numerous articles in Car and Driver articles which read something like:

"This car would handle really well, if only you could fully disable the traction and stability control. Please, we're all grown-ups here. We know how to drive."

So please, would the good folks at Microsoft and Mozilla offer an easy way to disable your code for filtering email and scam controls?

*Full disclaimer - after writing this - I did figure out how to disable ThunderBird's scam filtering - but it's not configured in the same dialog the other filtering functionality is)

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