Fwd: Paul Graham email meets clumsy spam filters

[Greg Louis]

This is forwarded (with bits snipped out to remove identifying
information) from Paul Graham's "spamfilt" list.  I thought our readers
would be interested...

=== Paul Graham writes: ===

Here's a story about the dangers of clumsy spam filters.  I have
written two articles about spam filtering for the trade press.  In both
cases, when I submitted them they got filtered out by simple-minded
keyword filters installed by the magazine's IT people.
   
> Paul -- When the systems folks retrieved your email and sent it to
> me, the message on it was: "This message was stopped because it
> contained 'make money' and 'porn'."
 
>> This is the second time (out of two) that this has happened with an
>> article about spam for a magazine. What in the email did the filter
>> object to?  I don't want to offer suggestions, in case this gets
>> bounced too.
>> --pg

> > Paul -- Yes, I spoke with our systems folks a little while ago and
> > our filter was indeed kicking out your email, as you had guessed.