When it’s a solicited feedback from a contract bidder that gets blocked by a spam filter and causes the contract to not go to the lowest bidder.
Which is the position Cobb Schools in Georgia is facing, in awarding a phone system bidder that was $250K/year higher than another competitor, when that competitor’s e-mail got filtered out.
There it was in the e-mail spam filter, along with offers to invigorate both your bank account and your sex life: an offer to save the Cobb County schools $250,000. But this message was for real.
School officials are blaming an overeager junk-mail filter for capturing and killing a Kennesaw businessman’s bid to provide telephone services to the system. It seems the part of the filter that watches for pornographic material was offended by the use of terms such as “long distance.”
Not able to check for the missing e-mail, school officials figured the businessman never responded, so he was disqualified. BellSouth won the contract, worth about $670,000 a year, in late February.
Mike Russell, president of Elite Telecom Services, appealed the process through the school system, but on May 1, Superintendent Fred Sanderson denied the appeal and declared the matter closed.
The school district says it’s the bidder’s responsibility, that either they should have followed up or that they should have somehow known a message would be blocked.
The bidder, on the other hand, notes that this was the only message that didn’t get through, and that the school district had explicitly requested e-mail responses after the first hardcopy bid package. He’s declined to sue (a small miracle right there), but isn’t very happy about the situation.
Lessons learned (by me, at least, if not by the school district or vendor):
- As a bidder, follow up, even if you’ve been told to just e-mail. Request an acknowledgement, and call if you don’t get one. Use this incident as an excuse for bothering them.
- As a business, don’t blindly trust spam filters. Especially if you require e-mail messages, as a condition of business, you must allocate time on someone’s part to review what’s been blocked,
(via Techdirt)
There are a whole raft of reasons why we don’t filter spam at the server level on campus, and that is one I had not thought of. Instead we let each user’s mail client filter the spam because the user refines the rules as he goes. In addition, most spam filters are configured to mark as safe-senders any address with which the user has corresponded.
And I suppose, when the request for bids is put out, each company’s domain should be put in the safe-senders’ list as a matter of procedure.
And, where that kind of cash is involved, it’s certainly a good place to use registered US mail instead.