Several readers have written to me with a link to the Red Tape Chronicles report that AT&T has been caught tagging its Terms of Service Update Notifications as spam.1
Last month, AT&T made some controversial changes to its Internet policies. Verbiage indicating that high-bandwidth users might experience some intentional slowdowns irritated some techies; another section that forces customers to use binding arbitration to resolve disputes annoyed consumer organizations; and an L.A. Times reporter bristled at the size of the full new agreement — 2,500 pages.
But Lance Mead, an AT&T Internet customer from Encino, Calif., almost missed the entire controversy. His notification of the new terms of service was sent via e-mail on Sept. 18, but AT&T’s own spam filters trapped the e-mail as spam and deposited it in his junk mail folder, he said. On a whim, he checked the folder and spotted the notice. He was furious.
“AT&T wants to enforce the change in service that they prevented their customers from reading,” he said. “I have called AT&T and they act as if this is the normal and proper procedure.”
AT&T spokeswoman Susan Bean said company engineers talked with Mead after msnbc.com inquired about his case and determined that the terms of service e-mail “inadvertently” ended up in his junk e-mail folder.
“We apologized for any error on our end,” Bean said, adding that the message was deposited in the junk folder “perhaps by something he inadvertently did or by a filter error.”
It would be interesting to know if anyone else found this important notice in their spam folders or just Mr. Mead. This would show if the notice was filtered by AT&T or by some user action (Bayesian filter training, for instance).
At some point, this is going to end up in court on the theory that the service provider did it on purpose to minimize the likelihood that the message would be seen and read, even though it was, technically speaking, delivered (only just to the bulk folder instead of the inbox).
Still, what is important for mailers to remember is that if ISPs sometimes filter and send their own mailings to the spam folder, you shouldn’t be surprised if it happens to your mailings, too. You also shouldn’t be shocked to learn that your own filters sometimes catch your own mailings. It happens.
How do you minimize it? My best advice is to periodically look at the spam in your spam folder and see if your mailings look like your spam. If your mailings look like stuff that ends up in the spam folder, then don’t be surprised that your mail also ends up in the spam folder. Make a concerted effort to make your mailings not only look different from the competition but also from your spam.
Footnotes
- Bob Sullivan, AT&T; Customer Caught in “Spam-22,” Red Tape Chronicles – MSNBC (2008), https://web.archive.org/web/20081013041904/http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/10/att-customer-ca.html (last visited Oct 14, 2008). ↩︎
