Faithful can't march on spam

The Association of University Teachers saw its efforts at communication blocked by gremlins last week. Thousands of copies of an email from Matt Waddup, the assistant general secretary, about balloting for industrial action were designated as junk by spam filters and assigned to the dustbin by university email systems.

The reasons the mail was identified as spam included: an attempt at obfuscating the word "mortgage"; the phrases "if you do not wish to receive any more" and "save big money"; instructions on how to stop further spam; a line of text 199 characters long; and the use of a dotted-decimal IP address in a URL.