This is a tale of spam-blocking gone wrong. Spam blocking technology has a very noble mission on the surface -- protect Grandma from Nigerian scammers and Billy from seeing a grown man naked. It also eliminates a whole lot of time wasting and frustration, as well as virus and spyware-laden adds for "v1Agr a". And though I often suspect I am getting steganographic messages from Aliens, Trisha, I have given up trying to crack them. So, spam-filtering helps my life, personally.

Well, this is sort of a sinister and sad tale. That benign force of good, Bright Mail -- one of the main blockers of this oily, misspelled, vomit-in-e-mail-form -- has apparently been subverted in an insidious way.

It appears that somebody at Symantec added AfterDowningStreet.org to Bright Mail's blacklist, causing all of Comcast to stop sending e-mail containing this domain name in the content. This site is a political site that has been up for under two months and, incidentally, doesn't send spam. Suffice it to say that a lot of people don't like them for being a big pimple on the nose of our public discourse, or lack therof. I digress. I would love it if somebody from Symantec would tell me this is all a mistake or an accident. Could a third party intentionally spam others, using their domain, to get them on the blacklist? [How does Bright Mail get data for it's blacklists, for that matter? I honestly don't know.] Is it a conspiracy to deny them e-mail service? Did Comcast realize what was going on? Was it politically motivated and intentional? If it was the former, what a clever way to screw your enemies -- send a ton of spam as them and get them on Bright Mail's blacklist, so that the largest ISP in the country will blackhole their e-mail. Brilliant! If it was the latter, what a horrible precedent to set, squelching the modern day expression of lawful political expression.

Read More:

How Comcast Censors Political Content
Or Why My Comcast Horror Story Is Better Than Yours
by David Swanson