The Wall Street Journal has an interesting summary of the anti-spam measures being used by the leading ISPs. Most everyone that has worked with some SPAM fighting solution is aware of false-positives, messages which are caught as SPAM that in fact are legitimate. Interestingly enough, the article covers a more annoying aspect of SPAM filtering — outbound message blocking. As noted:

Marion Pattillo, the executive director of an interfaith group in Dallas, recently sent out an e-mail to about 35 people to drum up volunteers to help paint the homes of local sick and elderly residents. All were people who normally pitch in on such projects, but a week later Ms. Pattillo hadn’t heard back from a soul.

There was a good reason: None of the potential painters ever received her message. It had been blocked by a spam filter, forcing Ms. Pattillo to cancel the charity project.

Source: Wall Street Journal

It’s quite unfortunate, but our ability to write e-mail messages with any message we choose has been greatly reduced as a result of the new potential for them to be purged by anti-spam initiatives. The only salvation for our ability to have restriction-free mail again seems to be some more intelligent white-listing at the server level.