Yahoo e-mail users who wanted to register online for the Federal Trade Commission's do-not-call registry, that will prevent telemarketers from calling their homes, found their confirmation messages intercepted by Yahoo's Spam Guard program. But Yahoo has since fixed the slightly embarrassing glitch to let the messages through.
NetFrameworks discovered the gaffe amidst the crunch of consumers joining the do-not-call registry within 24 hours of the registry taking listings. "Our tests showed that Yahoo's spam filter was automatically sending the confirmation messages from the do-not-call list into users' bulk-mail folders," said NetFrameworks co-founder and chief technology officer Eric Greenberg to Wired .
"The irony of it," he continued, "is that the spam filter is blocking the very thing that's supposed to help you stop getting spam over the phone."
Yahoo communications director Mary Osako told the magazine the confirmation messages got blocked because Spam Guard deliberately detects "unusual and extraordinarily large volumes of mail" sent to Yahoo e-mail users. But Osako added that Yahoo jumped right on the problem, touching base with the FTC's e-mail provider "to seek out needed information so that we could adapt our systems" and let the FTC confirmation messages through.
"The incident highlights a growing concern on the part of many e-mail users that the spam-filtering software being installed by more and more companies is blocking important e-mail," Wired said. "So-called false positives have been known to occur up to 5 percent of the time for filtered personal messages and up to 15 percent of the time for commercial messages, according to various estimates."
Yahoo's rate, however, has been pegged as high as 22 percent, the magazine added.
