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Real impacts of spam

15 February 2018

I don’t talk about it very often, but there are some real consequences to the mere existence of spam. In 2004, the FTC mentioned it as a driver in address churn​*​​(Federal Trade Commission 2004)​. Of course, unwanted messages get lost. Finally, we can blame the mere existence of spam for the existence of spam filters.

Some of all of that comes into play in this Washington story ​(Associated Press 2018)​.

Occasionally, you’ll see one of these “the spam filter ate your email” cases come along. An attorney often missed a deadline because their spam filter deleted a notification concerning upcoming deadlines or a court hearing setting. Those never end well for the attorney using the spam filter. And it doesn’t end well for the Mount Vernon School District here.

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The backstory is that someone sent an open records request to the school superintendent. I presume that was the proper person to receive the request, as that part doesn’t seem to be at issue. But, the request “was sent to an old email address for [the superintendent], and was rerouted to the district’s spam folder.”

So, as I’m looking at this, I am somewhat doubtful that the district’s superintendent just decided that he didn’t like his address and switched it. Something prompted that, and I wouldn’t be shocked if it weren’t due to incoming spam. Additionally, the district’s spam filter caught the message (so it appears that someone was still monitoring the old address). Both of those things resulted in the school district not responding to a message that no one appears to have known they had received until the time to respond had expired.

The result of all of this? The taxpayers of that district are paying someone $12,500 — because a spam filter caught a message.

References

  1. Associated Press. 2018. “Mount Vernon School District Settles Public Records Lawsuit.” KOMO News. February 20, 2018. https://komonews.com/news/local/mount-vernon-school-district-settles-public-records-lawsuit.
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Mickey Chandler
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