Remember those annoying calls from telemarketers back in the 80's and 90's? Technology has taken has taken product and services hustling to the email for a group of irritated employees.
Since 2010 I have received complaints from workers at the City of Houston who say their supposedly secure city email addresses have been inundated with spam.
I'm hearing this complaint mainly from Houston police officers.
Some think the city may actually be selling their email addresses to advertisers or marketing companies.
In 2010 officials with the city said selling email addresses was something they were not doing. However, those pesky emails are still arriving in some city employee boxes.
Tom Sorley with Houston's Information Technology department says when asked if the city sells email addresses, "as far as I know, we have no such policy. I will double check to make sure and let you know if I find out something different."
Are you a city worker and experience the spam through your email? If so send the Insite an email with a sample of what you're getting!
City of Houston's response: Isiah, I inquired about the spam filters we use at City Hall after reading your story. In addition to this information from our IT department, please note the City of Houston has not, does not sell any email addresses to vendors. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
The COH is using a spam filter called ProofPoint. They are a market-leading secure e-mail gateway which filters all inbound messages for both HPD and COH in general. As you can see from the attached spam reports, the COH is averaging approximately 33.778M inbound internet e-mails per month (total of Rule Activity + Spam Classification). Of those, nearly 27M are blocked immediately by specific rules before delivery through our system. More stringent spam filters are then applied to the remaining messages, where another 3.675M are blocked. Finally, anti-virus is run against the remaining e-mails which filters out an additional 30,000 before delivery.
Ultimately, only about 7% of inbound internet e-mail is actually delivered to end users. This is an extremely high percentage of filtering and considered to be very aggressive while still not generating a significant number of false positives. In short, the City’s spam filtering is highly effective. Of course, some spam will always get through. If we get more aggressive on spam filtering then we run the risk of a much higher number of false positives which could negatively impact City business. A 93% blocking rate is very high.
Jessica Michan
Press Secretary
Office of Mayor Annise Parker
Email address: IsiahCarey@gmail.com
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