Thursday, April 9, 2009

False Positive

Today we learned that several emails and resumes for positions like "Training Specialist" and "Marketing and Statistics Specialist" were getting caught in our spam filter. Can you guess why?

Marketing and Statistics Specialist... maybe they only have experience marketing a different product that does fit in with our business plan. Or maybe their domain was black listed. Another posisbility: maybe there's an undocumented feature* that weeds out bad candidates that have resumes that were poorly worded or unreadable.

Training Specialist

Could maybe the attachment had a worm or something, and the filter caught it. We had that problem before, and it was several months before we could get it all sorted out. Maybe the vendor for our spam-filter isn't an Equal Opportunity Employer, and it was filtering out Women, Blacks, Hispanics, and Handicapped people. Or maybe, it's something most of us would overlook...

Marketing and Statistics Specialist

Did you see it? look again, closely.

Training Specialist.

I LOLed when I heard about this. This is why you need to fine tune your software.

*For those unfamilliar with IT jokes, an "undocumented feature" is a programmer code phrase for "bug that we're trying to pass off as intentional so we don't have to fix it or admit we screwed up."

3 comments:

SarahC said...

oh, my ... I never would have even thought of that ...

Tiffany said...

Working, as I do, for an organization that sends a lot of emails with pharmacy-related keywords in them, we constantly have an issue with our stuff getting sent to spam folders, which means lots of handwringing and asking me if there really isn't anything I can DO about that. God help me if we ever run an education program about erectile dysfunction

Fuzzy said...

Yeah, that particular word is in the middle of a word that is pronounced nothing like it.

I wonder if there's way to allow or block mail via grammar based logic.

Hey, i just did it again :-)