False Positive

Three times I have tried to send an email to an editor about a pending story. Three times my email service say her company "bounced" my email for spam.

I'm getting cranky. I read my email and try to figure out what possible words I could have in the message that a newspaper would filter.

I can't figure out. Evidently I'm not alone. At least not in England where a survey taken this year says 40% of British workers say they have missed a deadline because of a false positive email.

"The spam hysteria of the last few years has created the impression that blocking unwanted e-mail is the primary concern for businesses, with the result that some service providers and companies appear to have lost sight of their users' real needs," said Nigel Brooke, a vice president with the European office of Mirapoint, in a statement.

"Filtering unwanted messages ultimately serves no purpose if it undermines the effectiveness of the overall message network's responsiveness," he added.

A conference spokesperson said that although false positives may be impossible to eliminate entirely, the result -- missed deadlines -- can be avoided by using such standard e-mail security and anti-spam tools as "white lists" and giving users easy and timely access to spam quarantine folders." 

According to the survey over 60% of participants said their real email was filtered out at least on a monthly basis. 25% said it happens on a weekly basis.

A quick search on Google didn't give me the ten tips to avoid  having a newspaper editor bounce my email.

Could it be the urgent notation I put in the email?

Could the second bounce have occurred because I mentioned the first email was bounced as spam?

Or, is my ISP currently being blacklisted because a real spammer is in my neighborhood?

I will call and give her a heads up about the email. Hopefully, her voicemail box isn't full.