I’m Sorry Teacher, the Spam Filter Ate My IPO   8/10/2004 - 1,140 views, 2 Comments

Summary: Two things are now clear to Aunty about Google's upcoming IPO: 1) They are moving forward with their somewhat novel concept of making their initial offering directly to individuals, by email, and 2) they are worried about that email being zapped ...

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Two things are now clear to Aunty about Google’s upcoming IPO: 1) They are moving forward with their somewhat novel concept of making their initial offering directly to individuals, by email, and 2) they are worried about that email being zapped by spam filters.

As such, Google and their investment house, Morgan Stanley, are asking ISPs and others to whitelist email coming in from “information at ipo.google.com”.

Of course, this is likely to cause an immediate rash of spammers spoofing “information at ipo.google.com” (and, indeed, spamming it - which is why Aunty has been so considerate as to spell out the “@” as ‘at’, which Aunty notes neither the Washington Post nor Morgan Stanley websites have done).

Still, if you are in charge of an incoming mail server, or are simply an end-user who has signed up to receive the IPO email, on the day of the IPO it’s probably a good idea to err on the side of caution and make sure that any email from “information at ipo.google.com” gets delivered to the inbox - or at least not deleted.

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Read more:

»  Care and Feeding of Your Spam Filter (Train, Train, Train)

»  Lawyer Misses Court Because of Spam Filter - Give Aunty Your Stories!

»  SpamAssassin 3.10 Released, with ISIPP’s IADB Sender Accreditation Support

»  CAN-SPAM Allows ISPs to Filter Email

For additional similar stories check out our archives on Google

 

2 Comments »

  1. So you see here it is because they big they are allowed to spam!! Unsolicited email is still trash google included!! I for sure will still zap their junkmail and all networks under my care will do same!

    Comment by Frans — 8/12/2004 @ 4:03 am

  2. The previous poster missed the point. Google will be sending their e-mail only to people who have signed up for it. They will NOT be spamming. They’ve made their request because the thousands of messages they send are likely to be falsely flagged by some ISP’s as spam.

    If you haven’t signed up and you receive e-mail from the mentioned Google address, it will be spam and it will not actually be from Google.

    Comment by Alan G — 8/12/2004 @ 2:17 pm

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