Neil Gaiman writes about how, for several months, mail to his publishers, DC Comics, was intermittently disappearing into a black hole. Eventually, the culprit was found: AOL-TW’s spam/virus filters. Any mail containing the word ‘Sandman’ — ie. the name of the comic he writes for DC Comics — was being filtered silently, without notifying either the sender or recipient. Wow. His editor’s computer guy reported:
I’ve been informed that the reason why there was a delay in the delivery of this message was because one of several keywords were found within the message. In particular, the word ‘SANDMAN’ was found several times. This has been a telltale sign of one or more computer viruses, so the message was set aside to be investigated by a WB security person.
(Via Crypto-Gram)