Charities Say Legitimate Mailings Have Been Blocked by Spam Filters

As the number of unsolicited advertisements — or spam — that e-mail users receive skyrockets,

individuals and Internet service providers are becoming more aggressive in their use of filtering systems designed to weed out unwanted messages. But charities increasingly find that their own newsletters and advocacy alerts, almost always sent out at donors’ request, are getting unintentionally snagged by the filters — a problem some experts fear will get worse.

Prison Fellowship Ministries, in Reston, Va., sends a daily commentary from its founder, Charles Colson, to 60,000 people. But as many as 36,000 subscribers did not receive one or more of the commentaries sent between November and March because AOL’s filtering system was tagging the messages as spam and wouldn’t deliver them to people who use its e-mail service.

When charity officials looked into the problem, they learned that the company the group had been using to send out its e-mail newsletters had landed on AOL’s list of organizations whose messages should be blocked.

Despite repeated efforts to fix the problem, the charity wasn’t consistently able to get messages to its subscribers with AOL accounts until it switched e-mail companies.

Alan B. Terwilleger, senior vice president for advancement at Prison Fellowship Ministries, says that his organization is on the receiving end of a lot of spam, so it understands the challenges that Internet service providers face. But at the same time, he worries about the damage that occurs when a company suddenly cuts off communication between a charity and its supporters, and he is frustrated by what happened to his organization.

“All this spamming that’s going on out there is not nonprofits,” says Mr. Terwilleger. “We aren’t the problem.”

Small Batches

While spam filters are getting better, there’s still plenty of room for improvement, according to Nick Allen, president of Donordigital, a technology consulting company in San Francisco. He says that the last version of the filter he uses identified almost all of the charity newsletters that he had signed up for as spam.

Mr. Allen and other consultants stress that if nonprofit organizations use an outside company to send e-mail newsletters or other messages, they need to make sure that the company is in constant communication with the large Internet service providers to make sure that their messages will go through.

Amnesty International USA has had occasional problems with filters blocking its newsletters and the advocacy alerts it sends to activists.

Vivianne Potter, a fund raiser at Amnesty, says the organization is taking basic precautions to make sure that its communications don’t look like spam to the filters. The group avoids using exclamation marks or all caps, and has started sending out messages in smaller batches.

“We send it in chunks, so that it’s not such a large number that we sound the alarms,” says Ms. Potter.

Staff members in Amnesty’s fund-raising department have test e-mail accounts with all of the large Internet service providers that they use to monitor whether the group’s messages are getting through different filters.

Worsening Problem

Michael Stein, associate director of Groundspring.org, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that processes online donations for more than 900 charities and provides e-mail services for nonprofit groups, worries that the filtering problem could get worse for charities.

Of particular concern is the move toward systems that bounce back e-mail sent from anyone who is not in a user’s personal address book with instructions on steps to take before the message is delivered. The instructions might be as simple as asking the sender to hit reply and type a specified word at the beginning of the message. In other cases, the sender might have to go to a specific Web page, copy down a number, and resend the initial message with that number in the subject line. The systems are designed to make sure a person is sending the e-mail, rather than an automated system blasting out spam.

So far, Mr. Stein says, Earthlink is the only major Internet service provider using a challenge-response system. But, he wonders, if other companies start to move in that direction, “how is a nonprofit going to deal with responding to 5,000 pieces of bounced mail that require immediate attention?” A charity can ask the people on its mailing list to add the organization to their address books, but that poses an extra burden to both the organization and its supporters, says Mr. Stein.

Lucy L. Craig, associate director for online and workplace campaigns at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in New York, first started getting returned e-mail messages from such filters about six or seven months ago. She estimates that currently she gets three to four such messages for every 10,000 e-mails Planned Parenthood sends out.

Even though the number of bounced-back messages grows with each newsletter or appeal the group sends, Ms. Craig says she is more alarmed by another consequence of the war against spam.

When Planned Parenthood first started collecting its supporters’ e-mail addresses, people usually gave their work address or an address from a major Internet service provider, such as AOL, says Ms. Craig. But now they are giving her group a secondary e-mail address set up to try to protect their main accounts from unwanted e-mail. Ms. Craig estimates that about six out of every 10 e-mail addresses the group collects are from free services, such as Hotmail.

“I know I check my Yahoo account maybe twice a month,” says Ms. Craig, as opposed to her primary e-mail account. “If you’re looking at a time-sensitive e-mail or a campaign with a short shelf life, you’re definitely not going to grab their attention in time.”