Are we giving away our power over information flow to the spam police? In this edition of letters to the editor, a reader's letter prompts Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz to expound on the line between free flow of information versus server clogging junk mail.

Blacklisted
My company will be enforcing DNS (Domain Name Server) blacklists soon, and your newsletter is identified by http://www.spamcop.net as being Spam. If that is the case, I will no longer receive it after this month.

Just thought you might want to know.

Chad Shilling
Information Technology Team
Borden Chemical Inc.
http://www.bordenchem.com

Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz responds
Sadly, that's the risk of trusting your information flow to a third party. According to SpamCop's own site: "This blocking list is somewhat experimental and should not be used in a production environment where legitimate email must be delivered. It is growing more stable and is used by many large sites now. However, SpamCop is aggressive and often errs on the side of blocking mail--users should be warned and given information about how their mail is filtered. Ideally they should have a choice of filtering options."

Chad, before your organization chooses a mail blocking solution, it might be valuable for you to research it. SpamCop states that its blacklist blocks mail from any source that receives a single complaint. We have over half a million readers and regularly get complaints, even though we have a single click unsubscribe option and limit our readers solely to those who opt-in. That's just the nature of life. We've even seen complaints from people we know and have verified signed up, but just forgot. So, if a list or publication gets a single complaint, it is then blocked by SpamCop. The key question is actually considerably bigger than DominoPower: do you really want to give away this much power over your information flow?

Finally, since SpamCop doesn't take any requests from publishers and claims there's no way to be removed from their list, I'd recommend that if you want to continue getting DominoPower, let SpamCop know. Or use a filtering product that doesn't filter valuable information.

Spam management is becoming a more and more serious issue. The problem is, of course, very real. I get more than 100 spam messages an hour. However, the filtering services make value judgments you might not make. I have a friend who works for a hospital IT department. He tells me that there are certain words (use your imagination) that spam filters regularly pick up that his doctors need to receive. Likewise, many third-party spam filters choose words to filter out. What if they start to filter messages containing, say, the word "Democrat" or "Republican"? Who controls the mail you get? How much power are you willing to give up to convenience?

It is quite literally the key question we as a society face every day, both in the virtual and in the real world. The effort to correctly answer that question is intrinsic to what makes us citizens in the modern world.