Rob Stuart, VP Marketing over at HCPro, just wrote in, "Another filter story for you. A customer's e-mail system blocked our e-zine, to which an employee was a subscriber, because we quoted a guy from a company named Gage-Babc*o*c*k*" These days I work hard to find alternate words to stuff that's filtered a lot, such as replacing "f^ree" with "no cost," but how the heck do you replace a source's name?"

Last night I heard from a (reliable) source who asked not to be revealed just yet that the USPS is about to help stop the whole filtering problem at the ISP level by allowing mailers to buy digitial safe conduct stamps. Which sounds great except for two things: The word "buy." Many mailers I know operate on a very thin edge of profitability these days and I suspect USPS's pricing won't work for them. Improved deliverability would have to be really huge to make it worth the investment.

Plus, much of the filtering goes on at the client-side level as the HCPro example above shows. No USPS safe conduct is going to stop fed up consumers and IT directors from using their own filters and stopping mail.

I hope I'm being overly cynical here and there really is a solution. :-)