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Cobb County filter blocks telco’s eMail
By Robert Brumfield, Assistant Editor advertisement

A telecommunications executive claims a Cobb County School District spam filter cost the district the chance to save $250,000 a year in telephone service. After the filter blocked Mike Russell’s response to a request for more information about his bid for services, Russell was disqualified from consideration because he seemingly failed to respond in time. The incident highlights the imperfect nature of spam filters–and serves as a lesson to vendors and school leaders not to rely solely on eMail for important communications.

June 5, 2006—According to a telecommunications executive in Atlanta, Georgia’s Cobb County School District missed a possible opportunity to save $250,000 a year in a telephone services deal, because the district’s spam eMail filter captured his bid information before it reached officials’ desktops.

District officials admit they never received the eMail message in question from Mike Russell, president of Elite Telecom Services. However, they say they have time-stamped evidence suggesting that Russell’s bid would not have won anyway–and that he has taken belated advantage of the situation to claim he should have.

Regardless of whether that is true, the episode underscores the imperfect nature of spam filters–and serves as a warning to school officials and vendors about the danger of relying solely on eMail for important communications.

It has become routine–almost a clich￩–in school districts and the workplace to criticize spam filters as being almost as annoying as spam itself. The filters are difficult to calibrate and often capture eMail messages from legitimate senders in efforts to weed out pornography, internet scams, and other unwanted solicitations.

Russel was bidding to get a lucrative local and long-distance telephone deal with the district. When Cobb County officials sent him an eMail message to ask some questions about his bid, his return message was eliminated as spam. District officials, who say they have no way to retrieve the message in question, say their spam filter likely caught Russell’s use of the term “long distance,” a common product spammers attempt to sell, and rejected the eMail as junk.

BellSouth Corp. ultimately won the telephone services contract, to the tune of about $670,000 a year for five years. That price is about $250,000 higher than what Russell, who was acting as a representative to the district for the telecom provider ITC Deltacom Inc., claimed to be able to offer, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which first reported on the incident.

Russell’s eMail message was a follow-up to a formal hard-copy bid already in possession of district officials, according to the Atlanta newspaper. When officials needed to get some questions answered, which is standard in most bidding arrangements, they contacted Russell via eMail and asked that he respond…

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