CaRT hit by spam and scam problems

THE Canal & River Trust's service of email stoppage notices is suffering from a spam and scam filter problem, writes Dave Stead.

Either CaRT itself or more likely its mailing subcontractor Mandrill (a division of Mailchimp/Rocket Science Group in Atlanta Georgia) are placing content in its messages which causes spam filters to misidentify the messages as spam and causes the common mail client Mozilla Thunderbird to misidentify the messages as a scam attempt.

Could lose notices

This could lead to stoppage notices being lost in the user's spam folder, leaving boaters potentially unaware of stoppages on their route.

Spam filters are not to blame for this, the fault lies entirely with CaRT or Mandrill due to their use of tracking links which are indistinguishable from fraudulent misdirection links found in spam and password 'phishing' scams.

Lot of boaters affected

The spam filters affected have upwards of 20 million users worldwide (and are usually set in place by the user's internet provider so the user may not be aware the filter exists),
Thunderbird have no total user numbers available but claim upwards of 9.5 million new installs per month as of March this year, so there are probably a lot of boaters affected by this.

I have emailed CaRT on this subject, including as much technical information as I believe it may find useful (I am a mail systems consultant of 20+ years experience and former spam filter developer, so I gave its people plenty to try and help them understand the problem).

Although most of your readers would not perhaps understand the technical side of this problem, I believe it may be worth issuing a warning to check spam folders for stoppage notices.