as 'abuse@skymall.com', I got a mail from XXXXX@earthlink.net complaining that

> "I have received unsolicited email containing an IP address from your domain...."

(name suppressed to protect the user).

In this case, the mail was sent by Southwest Airlines (not skymall), and the user had in fact
subscribed to their weekly "Click 'n Save E-mail Updates". There were links to skymall/swa
special offers in the message, but both SkyMall and SWA have rigidly enforced policies against
sending solicitations unless the user has subscribed (by opting-in) to the service.

I assume that the rude text of the message I received was generated by your program, and not
by XXXXX@earthlink.net, event though it was attributed to her/him.

Your program is ignorant as to whether an address belongs to an ISP or a normal business,
and apparently does no checking of whether the business follows user-friendly policies.

Your text is incorrect in assuming that the email swa sent was UCE or UBE because it
was not Unsolicited. This assumption is explicit in such passages as

> "The UCE (UBE) that I received is shown below with full headers."

Your text contained an explicit actionable threat:

> " Otherwise, the IP addresses that are reported below will be blacklisted and blocked
> by all users of this software throughout the future."

This requires connecting to -- and registering with -- this site (a clear violation of MY privacy rights) in order to correct your software's misjudgement. An email contact would be far more appropritate.
(You don't appear to allow for private messages complaining about your crufty program).

I suggest that you develop a white-list of companies known to have and abide by opt-in policies.

Our policies are clear, publicly available, and we follow them, and you do a disservice to all by painting
responsible companies with your brush of slander. You can find our p3p statement in the usual
'well known location',http://www.skymall.com/w3c/p3p.xml, referring (as usual) to the policy
description at http://www.skymall.com/w3c.policy.xml. We are BBB certified. In short, there is
a wealth of information available to your staff for the construction of a reasonable whitelist.

If you will provide an email address, and assurances that the email will be kept confidential, I
can send your message (with full headers, of course) to assist in your diagnosis.

I can empathize with your frustration and appreciate your effort in taking time to join this forum in order to clarify what has happened.

By way of explanation, Sp@mX does not use any algorithms to determine whether a message is spam based on its content, so no analysis or artificial intelligence is involved. A user simply clicks on a message in his Inbox to label it as spam, and afterwards, Sp@mX will automatically label any other message from that same IP address as spam for that recipient or any other user of Sp@mX who receives messages from the same origin.

Because selections are done by users, with all messages being labeled as legitimate email by default before being labeled by one user as spam, the process is prone to human error, but that is not the fault of the software itself. The software only automates the compilation and pooling of black lists and white lists, both of which continue to grow exponentially, so it is actually less prone to false positives than any other spam filtering software that I have ever encountered.

With regard to the content of the report that you received, the text of the complaint is fully customizable, and you received one that is a variation of one that many of us are attempting to refine. You did not receive the totally innocuous default message, which is only one simple sentence. Some users are so annoyed by the huge amounts of spam that they receive each day that their frustration may lead to somewhat offensive wording in some cases, but I assume that it is not very common. Those large volumes of daily spam that drives Internet users to purchase and use Sp@mX and similar solutions also makes it difficult to make every spam label selection entirely accurate.

I suggest that you write directly to the XXXXX@earthlink.net in case he is not active on this forum and politely ask him or her to be more careful about which messages he or she labels as spam and to double-check all messages that Sp@mX automatically labels as spam as a result of a previous recipient’s selection. I also recommend that you write directly to the author of this software, Jeff Hendrickson, to have your domain removed from the blacklist, based on your clarification above.

I hope this explanation has helped dissuade some of your frustration. Thanks again for your participation in helping us to further refine the software and reporting process.

I would only add that each user can create the message they want (under Configure>AbuseMessage). The default Sp@mX text is in no way rude.

It is also the responsibility of the user to make sure they are reporting UCE. With many users reporting thousands of spam emails, this probably was a reporting error by XXXXX@earthlink.net

I would say that in general Sp@mX users take spam very seriously and are very conscientious on reporting only spam. This was probably an honest mistake.