It has come to my attention that someone at Smileycons (who remains unidentified to me) posted part of an email I wrote to a customer then uses this email to label me as a fascist and even treats me as if I am Hitler.

This email seems to have generated a lot of personal attacks ranging from:

"filtering of your customer's e-mail is akin to fascism."

To

"WHO ARE YOU to censor ANY American citizen's right to decide for themselves what is and is not spam."

First of all let me state that I am completely against big brother government (there is a reason why I live in Alaska) and completely agree that censors are dangerous. I wouldn't think of censoring a customers email, however spam is a big problem so we are trying to do our best to offer an email service that isn't rendered useless by the seemingly endless spam.

That said, we make the inbound spam filtering the choice of the customer. Each customer has the ability to set the spam filter sensitivity, define whitelists and blacklists, or disable the spam filter. Because of this, we have NEVER censored what the customer receives. What email is blocked is solely controlled by the customer.

The outbound spam filtering is a bit more tricky because of where the spam comes from. You see, most of the spam doesn't come from spam servers, it comes from end user PCs. Spammers use viruses and other malicious programs to remotely use a victims PC for sending spam. Because of this, ISPs are starting to look for spam in outgoing email. Those of you that think this is specific to AP&T please google for "port 25 blocking" and you will find that most ISPs now do this. The idea is to stop these malicious programs from using the ISP's mail system to relay spam, thus making it harder to send spam.

At any rate, the outgoing spam filter is set pretty tight, but we did put in a workaround last week that allows AP&T users to send anything they want. This workaround was specifically put in place to allow the Smileycons product to work.

As you can see, the problem never existed for inbound email and was quickly resolved for the outbound email.

Now as far as the public slandering, I'm not sure why the Smileycons people were so quick to brand me Hitler when this is really nothing more than a technical issue that had already been resolved. It's also amazing to me how many people where quick to send nastygrams even though they really didn't know what was going on.

Anyway, Smileycons, please before you go though all of that effort to destroy someones image and publicly slander them please consider the following:

1. Is this a technical issue or a censorship issue?
2. Is the issue resolved?
3. Does this really have anything to do with liberty?
4. Is email a 'right'?

Also, please consider posting the entire message, not just the parts that aid in the slander and, please, don't connect dots that shouldn't be connected. A false positive on an outbound filter does not mean that Alaska is un-American.