Wired News: Yahoo! Spam Filter Thwarts FTC:
Consumers who used Yahoo Mail e-mail accounts to register for the Federal Trade Commission’s new do-not-call service were met with an ironic twist Friday — Yahoo’s spam filter intercepted confirmation messages sent from FTC servers.
‘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 CTO Eric Greenberg. ‘The irony of it is that the spam filter is blocking the very thing that’s supposed to help you stop getting spam over the phone.’
FWIW, I signed up, without any hitches.
As noted elsewhere, their mail-sending systems were massively overloaded — an insane quantity of people were also signing up at the same time, from what I’ve heard.
But a day later, the confirmation message eventually came through, and got run through my ‘dogfood’ SpamAssassin 2.60 installation. That gave it -5.2 points. Not bad, considering they didn’t have reverse DNS records for the machines sending the mails out ;) (update: they do now, btw.)
In case you’re wondering, the tests it hit were: BAYES_00,CLICK_BELOW,DATE_IN_PAST_12_24,NO_REAL_NAME. Pretty respectable, really. Aside: that message getting a BAYES_00 match is impressive, given that (a) that Bayes db was initialized entirely from auto-learned mails, no hand-training; and (b) I’d never received a mail from the Do Not Call registry operators before.
Tamales: this is cool — San Francisco’s boozy culture paid homage last night to ‘The Tamale Lady’:
Tonight, Zeitgeist will swell again for Ramos’ 50th birthday party. There, San Francisco filmmaker Cecil B. Feeder will premiere his mini-documentary ‘Our Lady of Tamale,’ featuring 30-second songs submitted by dozens of San Francisco musicians.
Isn’t that nice. Ben says it went well. Somehow or other we missed her tamales last time we were up, but I’ll be sure to get one next time…