Schools Filtering DotCom E-mail - DotCom vs. DotOrg

April 5, 2007 9:40 AM

Two Part Question: 1) Do some educational institutions flag ALL .com e-mails as spam? 2) Is it unseemly for a for-profit company to use the non-restricted .org TLD for its e-mail addresses?

Part 1: A small educational publisher for which I sometimes freelance - and which has never sent spam - has inquired about changing all their e-mail addresses. (They use the .com variant of their domain, but also own the .org & .net versions.) In making the inquiry, they stated:

"Most of our clients are elementary and high schools, and most school firewalls now detect .com email as spam and send it to antispam folders where it is deleted before being read. Oftentimes our emails never reach our clients!"

Can this be true? I would imagine this would make it impossible for school personnel to communicate with 99% of the outside world.

This client has a propensity for interpreting anecdotal events as sweeping trends, so I'm tempted to think that's what this is - but they insist that they are hearing this from "many people". Can anyone verify this trend, and if so, which TLD(s) are best for combatting it?

Part 2: I could switch them over to .net or .org - though they seem to prefer the idea of using .org. Thing is, they are not organized as a non-profit (though they're barely profitable). I know the .org domain is not restricted, but it is popularly perceived as representing non-profit status. As such, I have advised them that using the .org might cause some people to feel they are somehow misrepresenting themselves. What do people here think - given the (possible) issue above, is using a .org address in a for-profit context a no-no?

posted by MaxVonCretin to computers & internet (17 comments total)

1) Maybe, if they're entirely clueless

2) In the old days of the internet, yes - but nobody cares anymore.
posted by putril at 9:49 AM on April 5, 2007

I asked a friend who does admin work for a school district. He said that his school district deploys spamfiltering software and each school in the district uses website blocking software (as well as port blocking, and filtering of certain file types as attachments or file shares), but there is no unilateral blocking of the .com domain.

Think it through. How would faculty and staff send email to work from their home accounts? For that matter, how productive would screening one top level domain be since most spam is zombie-generated and sent from all possible top-level domains -- including .edu.

Which is not to say it's impossible, since I've heard of far sillier executive orders. But unilateral, indiscriminate blocking would be suicidal for most educational institutions.

It's better for your client to establish whether they themselves are being blacklisted and act appropriately before they assume broad, sweeping causes for unproven claims.
posted by ardgedee at 10:14 AM on April 5, 2007

On 2: I would consider it dishonest for a for-profit to use a .org address, and as a result I would be very reluctant to ever do business with them.
posted by alms at 10:28 AM on April 5, 2007

If it's bulk email they're talking about (rather than individual messages to specific individuals), then make sure they're using a reputable third party service (e.g. MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, etc.) to do the sending, as they'll then take care of blacklisting and technical details. That also helps protect your everyday mail server from getting blacklisted by people marking the bulk email as spam.
posted by malevolent at 10:29 AM on April 5, 2007

At my school at least, there's no overall block of .com addresses. But the admins do run fairly aggressive spam filters and my own are fairly aggressive as well, so I routinely never see mail from students who insist on using their yahoo or hotmail accounts after I've told them to use the 100% free gratis .edu accounts the school has already set up. So anyway, while it's not a hard and fast rule -- I do see the occasional email from hotmail or yahoo -- they do seem a lot more likely to get flagged as spam either serverside or on my machine.

Unless the relevant press is a university press, I'd find it unseemly to use a .org.

If anything, I'd guess that the publisher's emails are getting lost because the commercial content of the email is getting them flagged as spam by the Bayesian filters.

That, or it really is spam and being correctly identified as such. If you're sending your previous customers an email with your new offerings this year, the name for that is "spam."
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:30 AM on April 5, 2007

I worked at a K-12 school district for the past 3 years.

In our environment (and as far as I know, most others) there was NO overall block of .com emails.... however (as others have stated).. our spam filters were set pretty aggressively, and (if I had to guess) the .com segment was the segment that got blocked the most. (course, it is also the most prevelant)

as ROU_Xenophobe said... we often times had students and outside vendors whose email couldnt get through because it had graphics or some other kind of content that the filter flagged as SPAM. Some of our teachers even got so frustrated as to use their external email as their primary email. (Yes, I was the IT Admin... NO, It wasnt my policy. Yes, thats why I left :)

I have the same problem now,.. running an free educational blog, and trying to get the word out to school districts is incredibly difficult. I've sent out hundreds of emails (manually...I'm not a spammer) and not gotten a single reply.
posted by jmnugent at 10:47 AM on April 5, 2007

Many small organizations' mail filters are so restrictive as to be useless for anything but internal mail and the few domains they decide to whitelist (which won't include commercial mailers either). It's the way they want it and until they switch to Google apps for their domain (or something else with sophisticated spam detection) that's the way it will stay. You're probably better off getting in touch with them through traditional mail or the telephone.
posted by Doctor Barnett at 10:50 AM on April 5, 2007

I would also be reluctant to do business with a for profit using the .org tld.
posted by HuronBob at 11:10 AM on April 5, 2007

A forprofit should not be using .org, period. Go with .net if you're really concerned, although I don't think any spam filter is going to be so inclusive as to block all .com's.
posted by radioamy at 11:28 AM on April 5, 2007

For what its worth, the Augusta National uses masters.org for the golf tournament going on this week.
posted by TedW at 11:34 AM on April 5, 2007

Have found through trial and error that if i send an email to a colleague at a university using my gmail account, if I include a link in the email it gets diverted into a junk mail filter. If i don't include a link, it goes through fine. If I use my own university email address to send from, then I can send a link without issue.

(this is a Canadian university).
posted by modernnomad at 11:58 AM on April 5, 2007

A for-profit using .org, to me, says "The .com and .net were taken, or we didn't know well enough to buy them", nothing more. That's still not a great message.

But any site sufficiently incompetent to block all .com mail will probably still block your .org mail based on some other attribute. Don't try to predict the specifics of incompetence. They'll always out-dumb you.
posted by mendel at 12:15 PM on April 5, 2007

I wouldn't count on this switch fixing anything. In my job, I have to have my boss send emails to our K-12 collaborators because my mail doesn't make it past their spam filters - and I have a .edu!
posted by solotoro at 12:23 PM on April 5, 2007

I'm confused by people who unilaterally say that for-profits shouldn't use .org. At this point, .org is no different from any other TLD -- it's a pool of available names, with precious little in the way of meaning other than "my preferred domain name was available as a .org". Any more meaning than that is inferred by the reader.
posted by delfuego at 4:41 PM on April 5, 2007

There was a time, in the relatively distant past, where a for-profit using .org, or a company unrelated to networking using .net (or using .net for something other than their networking infrastructure) would have caused me to raise an eyebrow, but those days have been gone for, I don't know, 7 to 10 years now.

Of course, these days even .edu isn't sacrosanct. I know quite a few people with completely bogus .edu domains. The closest to education they get is binge drinking like wild frat boy.
posted by wierdo at 5:19 PM on April 5, 2007

The anorexic succubus, Ann Coulter, was at anncoulter.org for a long time. If you want to use .org for your company, go for it--there's no way your company is as evil and selfish as that gasbag.
posted by HotPatatta at 9:01 PM on April 5, 2007

Well call me a luddite, but I still think that .org is appropriate for individuals and non-profits, but not for commercial ventures. Using .org for a commercial venture signals to me that the vendor is some combination of clueless, dishonest, and not creative enough to think of another domain name.
posted by alms at 7:15 PM on April 8, 2007