And blood is shed, there is a beaver war with a donkey!

I want to touch on the topic of the fight against spam. And in the vein, that the harm from this struggle has recently become more than the harm from spam itself.

** The Fight of Beaver with the Donkey is a phonetic-ironic rewriting of the phrase “The Fight of Good with Evil”, parodying the pathos reasoning about Good and Evil.


It happens that the struggle with something over time begins to do more harm than good. For me, as an Internet user, such harm brings an insane fight against spam. By insane, I mean the struggle that goes on without the need to think and care about the users of services and sites. For me, the fight against spam brings more inconvenience than spam itself.
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post office
We managed to choose a topic related to the analysis of 64-bit programs. And as a result, we made a mistake, the consequence of which was realized when it was too late. We chose the domain name viva64.com , which was supposed to reflect our connection to the 64-bit world. Communication may reflect it, but the presence of numbers in the name is a bad idea. There is an assumption, constantly supported by statistics, that numbers in email addresses are perceived as a hint of spamming. And as a result, letters do not regularly reach, stopped by robots by the presence of numbers. Once written from the address xyz33.com, then spam.

At the same time, I do not mean that we are doing mailing of letters and we are offended that letters do not reach. This we have never done. Letters do not reach people who are really interested in receiving them. The standard situation is when we answer a person to a question asked by him and wait. And after waiting a couple of days, we write from another mailbox and get the answers “oh, thank you, the previous letter got into spam” or “I haven’t received the previous letter”.

We ourselves have not used spam filters for a long time. The last filter burned in the furnace after a client was nearly lost because of it. It's good that he finally decided to write a letter in the spirit of “Well, will you answer or not ?! I have been waiting for a month already ”, which fortunately passed the filters.

Why filtered is understandable. Such correspondence contains the words "buy", "sale", "cost", "000", "proposal". And this is their essence, since the correspondence is conducted with customers about the sale and conditions. Spam filters go crazy with such emails. It seems to me that in the world there are frequent situations when transactions fail due to non-reaching letters. And if the management knew about them, then many administrators would lose their jobs, and the developers of the filters would be subject to complaints.

We read all the letters. It is better to look through the eyes of 50 letters with a proposal to increase something, than to miss one from a potential client. He may consider us inadequate and never write again. We must take care of people and not shift the difficulties associated with overcoming the barriers set by spam filters.

It is a pity, while few people understand this problem in communication. Perhaps it can be realized only when confronted with it.

Sites
The mechanisms used on sites to combat spam are even more confused and merciless to people. That is, spam on sites still appears, and is removed by the moderators manually, but the built automatic filtering systems harm real users.

In addition to the failure of the number 64, we have another problem. The fact is that we are developing a static code analyzer . Listen to this terrible word: anal yzer. As they say with this name live is not recommended. Do you think this is fiction? Nothing like this. For example, what happened with the description of programming lessons on one of the sites:


But this is not an indecent word, and the other is a horse. I think everyone understands what the lyrics say about horses. And when I posted my articles on a completely sane programming site, the following happened:


That is, all other articles were liked and were posted, and this one with the word “horse” was filtered. But a good article. On some sites praised .

Conclusion
Where are the benefits of spam filters? I still read all the letters. And customers have to write 2-3 times from different mailboxes and different text to bypass them or intermediate spam filters. After all, letters contain anal ysis, dollars, price ...