I am the only one who thinks the whole spam filter thing is getting just a little out of hand. In a message to a mailing list I am not only a member of but also administer, I used the term lower rate that was blocked by the spam filters because it appears commonly in messages that are spam.
Specifically, this is what I said:
Two things struck me that we (organization) might want to look at. First, my suggestion that we raise the dues to $15 does not seem too far out of line anymore (in fact, it looks like a bargain - maybe we should market the lower rate and scoop up some of other organization's membership). Second, I like the "penalty" idea - pay late, pay more. I don't know what our arrears status is, but if it is significant, that might get some people to pay (of course it could backfire too).
Now, perhaps I have just been around this industry too long, but at what point do we have to say enough when we cannot use common phrases to discuss typical topics just because they are also appearing in messages we don't want to receive. Maybe a better question is what do we do to curtail what has, admittedly, become a blight on a tool that almost everyone depends on for day-to-day communications and information sharing? The suggestion the mailing list manager gave me was to include an extra space between the phrase. Maybe it is just me, but that is silly. And this is not the first time. When I was sending an email about having a new copy of a popular Linux distribution that I know our group uses, the system bounced the message because I was talking about distributing CDs. This is a technical mailing list for technical people discussing technical terms. Do we have to invent new words to get past the spam filters?
I am at a total loss personally. I send out a number of email messages to students, ARES people, club members etc. Some times I will compose a dozen of them on the train and then send them when I get where I am going. It has gotten to the point that when I send more than 10 messages to ANY address or set of addresses in AOL's name space (for example) that I get blocked as a spammer and have to resend the message(s) one at a time over a period of time to get them to go through. This does not help my time management, which email was supposed to do.
1:43:27 PM 
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