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Quote:America Online's controversial plan to charge mass e-mailers a fee to bypass their anti-spam system highlights the other, lesser-known, horn of the junk-e-mail problem: Filters that allegedly work too well.

At issue is the problem of "false positives," industry-speak for legitimate messages mistakenly filtered out by anti-spam software.

"If AOL or another ISP decides that someone's a spammer, then no e-mail from that individual gets through," said EFF attorney Cindy Cohn...

Estimates vary as to how large a problem "false positives" represent. JupiterResearch estimated that in commercial mailings, 12 percent of marketing e-mail was blocked because of false positives in 2005...