Why Ebay mails get caught in my SPAM filter
April 9th, 2008 by TheBonsai
Yesterday, I bought something via Ebay. This morning, I found the related automatic mails stuck in my SPAM filter – I analyzed a bit, because it seems to me that Ebay is the only company that sends automatic mails to me that trigger my SPAM filter (others are mostly okay!).
SPAM filter said “Invalid date in header (wrong GMT/UTC timezone)” to
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2008 09:16:18 -0700 (GMT)
…which is a very weird timestamp, because last time I checked, the GMT wasn’t 7h away from the UTC.
Next was “Subject: has too many raw illegal characters” to a subject headerline containing unquoted non-ASCII characters. Though this is a minor issue, I see nothing over-complex in the nearly 25 years old specification of how a mail has to look.
The rest of the SPAM scoring was the text layout and the HTML glibberish that is typical for a SPAM mail.
I don’t get why Ebay – a relative big Internet company – sends such mails. Alone the date/timestamp – I hope the administrators of the mail systems don’t touch the critical stuff like PayPal or similar. Alone if you look at those mails – there’s no big optical difference to the SPAM mails offering Viagra&Co.
I’m not that picky about emails and their standards compilance, but at least two of the factors shown above are simply silly and easy to fix – for a big Internet company. I wonder why those mails aren’t touched by the mail-provider’s filters. And no, whitelisting the sender address is not a nice option – spammers also know these addresses, and spammers also will use them.
Just my 2ct for today
Category: Uncategorized, english | 5 Comments »