{"id":9623,"date":"2006-05-24T09:52:10","date_gmt":"2006-05-24T16:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2006\/05\/24\/when-is-a-spam-not-a-spam.html"},"modified":"2006-05-24T09:52:10","modified_gmt":"2006-05-24T16:52:10","slug":"when_is_a_spam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/05\/24\/when_is_a_spam.html","title":{"rendered":"When is a spam not a spam?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Which is the position Cobb Schools in Georgia is facing, in awarding a phone system bidder that was $250K\/year higher than another competitor<\/a>, when that competitor’s e-mail got filtered out.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Lessons learned (by me, at least, if not by the school district or vendor):<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. 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.\n
  2. As a business, don’t blindly trust spam filters. Especially if you require e-mail messages, as a condition of business, you <\/em>must allocate time on someone’s part to review what’s been blocked, <\/ol>\n

    (via Techdirt<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spam"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10077,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/09\/08\/e_mail_spam.html","url_meta":{"origin":9623,"position":0},"title":"E-mail spam","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 8-Sep-06 12:39pm","format":false,"excerpt":"I seem to have an actual working solution with spam here on my account. I get about 100+ pieces a day coming in, but I have to intervene with it...","rel":"","context":"In "My Computer"","block_context":{"text":"My Computer","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/my-computer"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":68,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/07\/02\/spam_spam_spam.html","url_meta":{"origin":9623,"position":1},"title":"Spam, spam, spam, spam …","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 2-Jul-03 7:13am","format":false,"excerpt":"E-mail accumulating in my inbox from Thursday p.m. to Wednesday a.m.? 240 pieces. E-mail left there after I ran my iHateSpam filter? 76. Two false positives. One false negative. Yeesh....","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11463,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/08\/22\/bacon_bacon_bacon.html","url_meta":{"origin":9623,"position":2},"title":"Bacon-bacon-bacon!","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 22-Aug-07 3:30pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Doyce notes the New Slang of the Week: Spam = Email you don\u2019t want. Bacon = Email you want, but not right now (google alerts, newletters, mailing list messages,...","rel":"","context":"In "Spam"","block_context":{"text":"Spam","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/computer-security\/spam"},"img":{"alt_text":"spam","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/spam.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8227,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/01\/17\/spam_spam_spam.html","url_meta":{"origin":9623,"position":3},"title":"Spam, spam, spam, spam …","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 17-Jan-06 6:15pm","format":false,"excerpt":"My Internet host, Hosting Matters, is rolling out a new anti-spam system to its various servers, and it finally got to mine. The new system, MailScanner, still uses the SpamAssassin...","rel":"","context":"In "Spam"","block_context":{"text":"Spam","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/computer-security\/spam"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6063,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/06\/01\/crafty_little_b.html","url_meta":{"origin":9623,"position":4},"title":"Crafty Little Buggers","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 1-Jun-04 9:38am","format":false,"excerpt":"Spam mail from folks with nonsense names (brxtlfrk@spamking.com), or clearly made-up and unrecognized names (bambi del toro)? No problem. Spam mail from spoofed internal company addresses, complete with domain names,...","rel":"","context":"In "Spam"","block_context":{"text":"Spam","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/computer-security\/spam"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3993,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/03\/03\/spam_spam_spam.html","url_meta":{"origin":9623,"position":5},"title":"Spam, spam, spam, spam …","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 3-Mar-03 6:45am","format":false,"excerpt":"Well, phooey. This morning, 106 e-mails in my inbox, 1 e-mail automatically detected as spam and sent to the Junk folder. Of the 106, 86 were actually spam. 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