Having done some work involving bulk email, I'm well aware of both the concern for receiving spam, as well as the frustrations of legitimate marketers that would like to get their message out to people that agree to receive it.

Unfortunately, all that runs into a brick wall when it comes to AOL's hyper-secure spam filter. But I'm already used to swearing at AOL in the first place, and this bit of angst directed at them is nothing new. It's as if Microsoft came out with a new product and it made your computer crash ... who's really surprised by that?

But now, I've done what I occassionally do and checked my Yahoo spam folder ... and discovered that one of my friend's emails has been in there since yesterday. Every other email I get from him goes through fine ... but in this one weird, flukey moment, one email doesn't. There's also a lot of cases in which stuff I subscribe to will occassionally get filtered out, but not always. I've tended to be indifferent towards that since many such subscriptions aren't at the top of my reading list anyway.

The whole point here is ... what's the point? What purpose does it serve to have such a great spam filter if, in the end, you have to check through all that damned spam anyways to sift out the emails you do need?

*end of rant*