FC: Oklahoma ISP filters mystery bookstore newsletter as "unsuitable"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://news.bookweb.org/621.html

The Mystery of the Bounced E-mails Solved: The ISP Filtered It
Bookselling This Week
Jul 10, 2002

Mary Alice Gorman and Richard Goldman, the husband and wife owners of the
Oakmont, Pennsylvania's Mystery Lovers Bookshop, are veteran e-newsletter
publishers. They understand that, when mailing out an e-newsletter, bounced
e-mails are part of the game. The reasons for undeliverables are numerous:
addresses change constantly, Internet Service Providers [ISPs] and the
Internet can be unreliable, e-mail addresses are often written down wrong,
etcetera. One reason that never occurred to them was an ISP bouncing their
e-mails on purpose. Unfortunately, one month ago, Goldman and Gorman were
shocked to discover that at least one ISP was doing exactly that.

Sirius Systems Group, an ISP based in Lawton, Oklahoma, filtered out Mystery
Lovers Bookshop's e-mails because the bookstore's domain name,
mysterylovers.com, was deemed obscene by Sirius' filtering program,
according to Goldman. "[Sirius] filters [out e-mails with] message lines and
incoming e-mail addresses containing stuff not found in family newsletters,"
he explained. "[The word] 'lover' happened to be one of them."

Goldman found out through mystery writer Eve K. Sandstrom that Sirius
Systems was filtering its e-mails. Goldman said that e-mail communications
with Sandstrom had always been problematic. "We'd reply [to Sandstrom], and
it would bounce," he said. 

[...]



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