I don’t talk about it very often, but there are some real consequences to even the existence of spam. All the way back in 2004, the FTC mentioned it as a driver in address churn.1 Of course, wanted messages get lost. Finally, we can blame the mere existence of spam for the existence of spam filters.
Some of all of that comes into play in this Washington story.2
Every once in a while you’ll see one of these “the spam filter ate your email” cases come along. Most often, it happens because an attorney missed a deadline because their spam filter deleted a notification concerning upcoming deadlines or a court hearing setting. Those never end well for the attorney. And it doesn’t really end well for the Mount Vernon School District here, either.
The backstory is that someone sent an open records request to the school superintendent. I presume that was the proper person to receive the request, as that part doesn’t seem to be at issue. But the request “was sent to an old email address for [the superintendent], and was rerouted to the district’s spam folder.”
So, as I’m looking at this, I am somewhat doubtful that the district’s superintendent just decided he didn’t like his address and switched it. Something prompted that change, and I wouldn’t be shocked if it weren’t due to incoming spam. Additionally, the district’s spam filter caught the message — so it appears that <em>someone</em> was still monitoring the old address. Both of those things had an end result of the school district not responding to a message that no one appears to have known they had received until the time to respond had expired.
The result of all of this? The taxpayers of that district are paying someone $12,500 — because a spam filter caught a message.
Footnotes
- Federal Trade Commission, National Do Not Email Registry: A Report to Congress (2004), https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/can-spam-act-2003-national-do-not-email-registy-federal-trade-commission-report-congress/report.pdf (citing a RoperASW/Bigfoot Interactive study finding 11% of adults had switched ISPs or email providers in a six-month period; DMA estimated email address churn rate at 32%). ↩︎
- Associated Press, Mount Vernon School District Settles Public Records Lawsuit, KOMO News (Feb. 20, 2018), https://komonews.com/news/local/mount-vernon-school-district-settles-public-records-lawsuit. ↩︎
About the Author
Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
