Spam is a big problem in today's Internet. A lot of companies are turning to professional mail-service companies in order to avoid being spammed to death. That's a good solution – or is it?

That depends.

Here is how those service-companies usually work. They use public DNSBL lists as well as proprietary filters that try to distinguish good from bad (= spam) mails. Whenever the company declares an incoming mail to be 'spam', it will be quarantined . A daily report of all quarantined mail is generated and forwarded to their respective clients. In a perfect world, the clients browse this list and pick which of those 'spam' mails should be re-qualified as 'good' and be made available for them.

All quarantined mail will usually be deleted after 30 days.

Unfortunately, we are not living in a perfect world. I am not browsing my spams, I just delete them every other week or so. That's what most people do. And that's the problem.

What happens, if, for whatever reason, your important mail is flagged as 'bad' by some proprietary filter at some mail-service? It goes on to the 'spam' list and, since nobody reads it, your mail is deleted after 30 days.

This wouldn't be a problem IF the mail-service would notify you about your dumped mail and the reason for dumping. But most don't do that. They silently discard the mail and that's that.

Once again: If I dump my spams, well, that's my decision. Not only am I using generally accepted freeware spam-mail filters, I am NOT a company providing mail-service for third parties.

I can't accept however, that professional service companies are claiming the right to decide whether or not to forward mail based on their filters decisions. They should know that a lot of their customers don't read their spam reports and they shouldn't be allowed to delete mails without sending notifications to the sender.

Now – I understand that they are handling hundreds of thousands of mails each day. Sending rejection reports to each and every spam-mail sender must be a big headache. But mail is their business. They can't just rely on their customers vigilance to read their spam reports and to pick one or two important mails out of possibly hundreds of real spams. They are entrusted with their clients communications and can't decide if an email is important or not.

This is why they need to notify senders if they dump any mail.

Unfortunately they don't do that.

No you know why that big company didn't answer your job application. They never saw it.