April 15, 2004
.Mac .Mail .Missing
Over at the home office, we have been using the online advertising and affiliate tracking services of My Affiliate Program to monitor response rates of the various email campaigns we send to the folks who register on our site. At some point, we plan to replace this rather convoluted and, at times, painfully implemented service with our own home brew system. But until that time arrives, it works as well as can be expected. Prior to sending out an entire email campaign (using the marvelous, and not quite released, OS X-savvy version of eMerge from Toronto-based Galleon Software, I might add…), I send a test multipart message to my .Mac email account as a sanity check. Using the .Mac webmail interface, I can check that the HTML component of the message is rendering as it should, as well as being able to make sure that any custom variables have been inserted into the message body correctly. Checking the same account via POP3 using Claris Emailer, I can also verify that the plain text portion of the multipart data comes through in one piece. At least I was able to this up until today. When I sent the test message to my .Mac account this week, nothing ever showed up in my mailbox. Puzzled, I send a quick test message from Emailer instead. That one arrived. I sent another version of the campaign message using eMerge, this time selecting plain text only. That one showed up as well. This indicated that something within the HTML component of the message was either causing my account to choke or Apple decided to crank up whatever undocumented spam filtering it has in place. After cutting and pasting my way through the code, I discovered the latter must be true. As soon as I removed the one link pointing to myaffiliateprogram.com, the email went through as if nothing was ever wrong in the world. (Yes, I suppose this is a type of web bug. And yes, I suppose that it couldbe argued that we should use such vile creatures. However, we only use it to track basic user response rates to our email campaigns. Nothing else. Really. Sorry.) I don’t mind Apple attempting to keep our best interests at heart and implementing automated spam filtering on it systems. I don’t even mind having to find a work around in order to maintain the ability to track our campaigns. However, what I do mind are systems that blindly filter everything that flash a certain signature or originate from a certain domain, regardless of the legitimacy of its purpose. Unfortunately, this is one of the fundamental issues with spam filtering and having to deal with false positives. While we’re on the topic, I also mind not being told what is being filtered in the first place. And I mind not being able to turn off the filtering at my discretion. If any one has ever seen documentation regarding .Mac account filtering, a pointer would be greatly appreciated. It seems that replies from their customer service department on such matter are few and far between. Maybe they’re getting filtered too.
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