Confusing feedback from the Postini spam service | Dafacto
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Confusing feedback from the Postini spam service

15 February 2011

Postini is a hosted spam service, now owned by Google, which filters your mail before it arrives to your account, placing anything it considers spam into a “quarantine”. When you ask Postini to deliver an incorrectly caught good message, it gives you the option of adding the sender to a whitelist.

Unfortunately for me, whenever I try to whitelist a sender, I receive the following screen with what appears to be an error message:

This has got to be the most useless feedback I’ve ever seen.

  1. It's unclear what this error message even refers to. Is it referring to the delivery of my email, or the whitelisting of the sender? Or could it be related to the text with which it has proximity -- the "Junk Email Blocking"?
  2. "List length limit (4000) exceeded." What exactly could that mean? I've checked, and I've only whitelisted 169 addresses. Our best guess is that "4000" refers to the total number of characters (4000 characters / 169 email addresses = about 24 characters/email address, which could fit.)
  3. Finally, how about some indication of what I can do to remedy the situation?

The designers of this system obviously have little empathy for the users, and as a consequence, users like me end up frustrated and wasting a lot of time.

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