What this WIRED article tells us is that the tightening of anti-spam filtering software is increasingly interfering with legitimate emails. It seems that the mere mention of the word "free" in an email triggers most spam filters, causing those emails to be dropped.
There must be a better way to stop spam. If more email marketing people would engage in permission email marketing, that would certainly help the credibility of email as a viable communications medium. But the real solution is going to have to be a combination of technical (redesigning the SMTP protocol to only accept trusted, verified email senders) and economic approaches (the "Spam. Don't Buy It." campaign).
As spam continues to proliferate wildly -- within a week after the
antispam Can-Spam act went into effect on Jan. 1, unsolicited commercial
e-mail increased by almost 7 percent, according to spam-filtering vendor
MX Logic -- some individual users, businesses and ISPs feel forced to
filter for spam more aggressively.
And while vigorous filtering will purge spam from inboxes, it can also
act as an unintended censor by suppressing any mention of the typical
spam themes -- and even references to spam itself -- in legitimate
personal e-mails.
"Patterns of e-mail use are definitely being impacted both by spam and
by antispam filters," said Craig Hughes, chief architect at McAfee
Security and co-developer of the open-source SpamAssassin spam-filter
project.