When e-mail started to become popular in the early to mid-nineteen nineties it was common to hear excuses such as “I never got that e-mail” and in some cases – as there were still glitches in e-mail – it was true. However, as e-mail has become ubiquitous it’s not really an acceptable excuse anymore.
Over the past couple of months a new e-mail related excuse has begun to become popular. “Your e-mail was stuck in my spam software”. If you’re working in PR, your e-mail address is probably on websites, on posted press releases etc. and as a result you are probably getting hundred of spam messages every day. Most of us have turned to anti-spam software to solve the problem, but as anyone who uses these products knows, they are far from the finished article. Indeed they only seem to catch fifty percent of the spam and fifty percent of the e-mail they do catch isn’t spam.
So remember when someone tells you that they never got your e-mail, but they subsequently did find it in their spam folder, you heard it here first!
Of course technical glitches like those experienced by Trend Micro’s anti-spam product (where any e-mail containing the letter ‘P’ is categorized as spam) doesn’t help matters very much. Thanks to Phil Gomes for the link!
Murphy's Law 