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Seriously, if you’re going to run a spam bot, at least learn to use it or run a test before you click the start button.  Otherwise, you’re just wasting bandwidth.

Apparently, when they emailed me a complaint the same day, to which I replied with their information the same day, they never received that either.

Then, about a month later, the customer did a charge back and at the same time emailed me a long lecture about customer service, complaining that they never received a response.  Interestingly, they did receive my response to the lecture, which briefly explained that the fault probably laid with their anti-spam product, but also thanked them for the feedback.

So, it’s interesting that the customer received my second email, but not the first, and didn’t receive an email from Plimus, the company that processes my yProxy orders for me.

Let me point out that neither I, nor Plimus, has ever spammed anybody.  So, why did our emails get blocked?

This can probably be blamed on an inaccurate anti-spam product.  Either the customer’s ISP, network administrator, or the customer is responsible for the failure.

Inaccurate anti-spam products cause you to lose valuable information and valuable time.  I know that my emails were delivered and accepted because I did not receive an SMTP rejection or a bounce back.  This means that the failure was between the customer’s mail server and the delivery of the mail to the customer’s inbox.  I must assume that the emails were delivered in absence of a message to the contrary.

It’s like me sending someone a letter, the postal carrier puts the letter in your mailbox, but you either overlook the message because you’re so used to getting junk mail and you think it’s just more junk mail.  Or, your mom throws away the letter because she thinks it’s junk mail.

Sending an email is, of course, actually more reliable than the above analogy.  It’s more like me personally handing the letter to your mom because you told me to.

Here’s the thing.  If you’re having to check your junk mail folder, then you may as well just read your mail in the inbox and forgo the anti-spam software.  If your mom is throwing away your mail, then it’s time to fire your mom.

It’s better to have false negatives, where some spam is delivered, than false positives, which marks some emails spam that aren’t.  If your anti-spam product commonly marks legitimate emails as spam, then you must always check your junk mail folder.  This, of course, costs you time.

There is only one antispam product that blocks 99.95% of spam, and is 99.999% accurate when delivering legitimate emails (blocks only 1 in 100,000 legitimate emails).

Get Greenview Data’s SpamStopsHere.  It’s what I use.  You should too.  Otherwise you’ll think people are ignoring you, and you’ll be frustrated, and you’ll spend entirely too much time emailing people misplaced lectures on customer courtesy.