Saturday, December 09, 2006

Verification Rant

"My spam filter requires verification of your email address"

I am now officially sick of getting this message when trying to repsond to submissions. If you have submitted a story to IGMS, or plan to submit a story to IGMS in the future, or plan to contact me about anything IGMS-related, add igmseditor(at)yahoo(dot)com and igmstwo(at)yahoo(dot)com (symbols have been replaced with words for the obvious reasons; I know you know how to fix that) to your e-mail address book. I am not filling out any more verifications just for the privilege of contacting you about something you sent to me.

End of rant. You may now resume your regularly scheduled surfing.

5 comments:

Maria said...

You might want to include a sentence or two in your guidelines that say you will not respond to submissions that require verification. I'm guessing it would also be helpful to include the address you will respond from. Lots of magazine editors do not respond to the filter and I don't blame them.

Part of the reason you may be having so much trouble with filters is that a lot of writers incorrectly assume your response emails will NOT be caught by the filter because the filter would okay a response from the address where they sent their submission. The trouble is that the response emails don't come from the same address as the submission address (in fact, I had a recent response and it did not come from the yahoo address you posted in this post, it came from an aol address that did not match the ones you listed nor the submission address.)

I'm not complaining. I don't use those filters and I think they are a pain in the neck, but writers do have to know what address to put in the filter. :>)

Best of luck,
Maria

Anonymous said...

You're not the first editor I've seen rant about this. I think if you're a writer and you're going to submit via email, then take OFF the filters. Deal with the spam. Don't chance an editor rejecting you because of this. I don't have a filter on my email, I just delete them a couple times a day. Better that than never hearing from an editor or agent. Just my opinion.

Aliette de Bodard said...

I've had too many emails eaten up by my spam filter to bother with it (I have an anti-American spam filter that assumes anything sent from outside Europe has to be spam). I sympathise; it's supremely annoying when you have to deal with other people's filters.

Edmund R. Schubert said...

Good point, Maria. I'll contact the managing editor Kathleen (who uses the aol address you mentioned) and our web guy and see about making the necessary changes to the submissions page.

Daniel said...

I just got one of these emails, from inbox.com and from a sender whose name I don't recognize. What an annoying piece of crap system inbox.com has!