gabe@gabegold.com
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2017 23:50:40 -0400
Check your spam box. It could be the SEC.
That's the lesson learned this week by Axon Enterprise Inc., the company best known for its Taser stun guns. Late Thursday, Axon announced that ``due to miscommunication issues,'' the company has just become aware of SEC requests regarding its previous financial reports and is now scrambling to respond. The stock fell as much as 7 percent, its biggest drop in more than two months.
What happened? Axon's internal email filters are to blame. The SEC sent its
initial comment on Aug. 10 and follow-up requests only to Axon's new CFO
Jawad Ahsan, and they were quarantined in a spam filter. Dougherty &
Co. analyst Jeremy Hamblin in a note to clients, called the incident
"embarrassing, but nothing to be concerned about.''
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-20/pesky-spam-filter-is-behind-taser-maker-ghosting-the-sec
That's not the lesson, it's the symptom.
lauren@vortex.com
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2017 07:28:19 -0700
The fundamental problem with spam folders, of course, is that they tend to be ignored by recipients, or only haphazardly inspected -- sometimes at very long intervals. False positive emails end up in spam unread, with no indication to the sender that they likely were not seen -- and may never be seen.
My policy on my servers has long been to do a hard reject on suspected spam, that should result in an immediate error returned to the sender. That error points at a URL that explains my policy, and provides another URL that can be used to push a brief "hey, you're blocking me and I'm not spam!" message through to me in those rare instances to request unblocking/whitelisting. Some sites that do this sort of real time response don't offer any way to communicate when there's a false positive -- they just say stuff like "spam, go away!" That's hopelessly ignorant and antisocial since false positives DO happen.
One oddity is that sometimes a false positive person will send me their note and say something like "how dare you accuse me of suspected spam" (that's what my error messages says, "suspected" spam). I always reply asking if they would have preferred their email disappear into a black hole spam folder without their ever knowing it hadn't been seen? That always ends the argument.
Re: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-20/pesky-spam-filter-is-behind-taser-maker-ghosting-the-sec