Official News page 4

HOW YOUR MAIL GETS LOST

by Hazed

A player reported a bug they had found in the game. He sent an email to feedback@ibgames.com with a detailed report of the bug, which gave us all the information we needed to fix the bug. Unfortunately, we never got the mail so the bug remained in the game.

Another player had a question about their subscription to buy slithy toves. He emailed feedback and asked us to check something. But the mail went unread and he never received an answer to his question.

A third player forgot his password. He send us some mail asking us to help him, but once again, the mail got lost somewhere and we were not able to assist him.

So why did these three emails get lost? Because these three hypothetical players forgot to put "Fed2" somewhere in the subject line of their mails. Consequently, our mail filters didn't realize they were genuine emails from real players, and treated them as spam.

You see, mail filters are dumb. They can't tell by looking at an email whether it's real or spam. All they an do is to follow some fairly crude rules to try to categorize mail.

Humans do a much better job. I can glance at an email and immediately tell if it's genuine or not. But I am currently getting around 1,500 pieces of email every day, of which maybe 40 or 50 are real. I can't possibly look at that many emails myself to figure out which ones I can ignore and which ones I should pay attention to. So I have to rely on my dumb, crude filters to sort them out for me.

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