Spam's Latest Spoilage

The Virginian-Pilot

Score another one for the spammers.

Their floods of e-mail pitches for Viagra, luscious lips and lottery schemes have blocked genuine electronic messages warning of real storms.

In an effort to reach large numbers of people quickly, emergency managers in Florida's hurricane-hit Indian River County began to send electronic alerts to their citizens. Some 4,200 folks signed up to be pinged by authorities when hurricanes, twisters and other severe incidents threaten.

But thanks to non-stop solicitations, Internet service providers everywhere have had to throw up spam-blocking walls to keep their systems from being overloaded and their customers from becoming irate.

So Indian River County's emergency-alert e-mails, while legitimate, looked suspicious.

And to Internet providers, like AOL, mass mailings equal spam. That means messages warning citizens of impending doom never made it to the inboxes of folks who needed the information.

This particular problem appears to be solved, thanks to a reconfiguration of the agency's e-mail server.

For those who rely on such information, that's about as comforting as knowing that while our dependence on e-mail grows, more important stuff will get lost in the electronic shuffle.

Copyright 2005 HamptonRoads.com/PilotOnline.com

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at

. Hundreds of new articles daily. And, discuss this and other topics in our forum at (or)

*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, HamptonRoads.com

For more information go to:

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Independence, KS tried the same thing without success, for the same reason. For a long time now, the franchise agreement with CableOne (and prior, with Time Warner) requires the cable provider to not only allow a couple of channels on television to the community (cable channel 10 for general community purposes; channel 14 for Independence High School and the college; Channel 22 for City Hall and county government) but they also had an arrangement where, if the police department or sheriff had some emergency announcement, they could 'flip a switch' and make their announcment over _all channels_ (for example, weather emergency; other police announcements for the entire community; i.e. two years ago when the little eight year old girl was kidnapped outside Lincoln Elementary School). So watch whatever you wanted on television, when police or city authorities had an emergency announcement, they could cut in and make the announcement. They rarely have to use it, but they still test it once a week or so, with a thirty-second announcement. (Steady tone for a few seconds, then a voice states, "This is Independence, Kansas Emergency Responders with a test message. This is just a test, had there been an actual emergency, Independence or Mont- gomery County emergency responders would have instructed you, etc."

Then a tone again and back to whatever program in progress you were watching. Just as sure as they test the emergency sirens on Saturday at 12 noon. _Never_ routine stuff; that is for channel 14 or channel

10 (which few people watch anyway).

Someone said "what about people with their faces buried in their computer screens?" So the response was "since _most_ people use Windows and Windows has that 'messenger' function where a screen can be flashed at you (it was not intended exactly that way, but most Windows users know how it can be done, and keep it turned off) Independence authorities arranged with Cable One and TerraWorld (our two primary internet suppliers to do something like that; but only for emergencies. If there was a weather emergency, a tornado for example, authorities would notify cableone.net and terraworld.net and gain control of many -- but not all -- computers in the community. The kids who manage the two ISPs here in town could easily make it happen, but what they did not count on was that there are more AOL ISP users here in town than cableone and terraworld combined. So the big spam-enablers MCI and AOL kept blocking police announcements, _thinking_ they were doing us a favor; some users got the warnings but most computer users did not. The result was much confusion; police eventually quit trying to notify people in that way, although they still continue to use cable television to do so. PAT]