My thoughts on spam filters and customer service

When I email people, friends, colleagues, you name it, I increasingly get responses back from SpamAssasin and BoxTrapper and other anti-spam mechanisms, asking me to validate myself as a real person before my email will be delivered.

This is effective in theory, but it's causing major headaches on the customer service side of things.

For starters:

- Customers who buy e-book products never receive download links
- Customers never receive important announcements and updates
- Customers never receive our helpdesk contact info, return policies, and so on
- Customers complain that they no longer receive our newsletters
- Customers do not receive receipt emails

...and on, and on.

(In case you're wondering, these types of emails are automatically generated and no one is there to validate each and every one ... exactly the type of email the filters are intended to block.)

My advice: Don't use these spam filters. I don't. I stopped when I began missing important emails, such as requests for me to come out and speak, interview requests from media, and more.

It's nice to not receive unwanted junk mail, but not at the cost of missing far more important emails as a result. It's not that big of a deal for me to spend a minute or two each day deleting spam from my inbox.

If you're a customer of online products, don't use these filters - keep at least one mailbox open and use that for online ordering, or for important contacts, or both. If you're an online merchant, be sure to remind customers to use a non-protected email address when ordering from you. Otherwise your helpdesk will be overwhelmed and hijacked by people who accuse you of not contacting them, when in reality it was their spam filter causing the problems all along.