AOL TESTS ANTI-SPAM FILTER
Droppage a Problem on Massive Networks

Quick post on a restful day after my younger brother's wedding. Beautiful and festive wedding. I'm so happy for my little bro.

Anyway, came across this article on News.com. AOL is trying a new spam filter, which is great. While they're at it, they should also work on their droppage problem. I've kept my AOL email account for about 10 years since early on it was convenient for me to access their service anywhere while I was traveling (pre-broadband days), and I continued to keep it for continuity sake as a personal email account. Over the past couple years, I used it more frequently and I've noticed how I don't receive some emails. It's not because of spam filters too because I would receive the second email if it was a group email and someone sent a response to the whole group again. I'm guessing there is some droppage of emails in the AOL system due to an overload of emails, which sucks because I could have offended someone or a relationship could have been weakened since I didn't respond to an email I never received... "That bastard Bernard... never writes me back! Yada, yada, yada..."

This also happens in Korea on my SK Telecom mobile phone service. I estimate about 10% of my calls never reach me. They don't even show up on my caller ID. I only find out that someone called if they leave a voice message or tell me later on in person or email that they called me. Also for SMS messages, which Koreans love, suffer from about a 10%+ droppage rate too, which I remember reading somewhere. For my wireless service, I initially thought it was my phone or certain coverage areas, but I later on found out that those factors don't come into play. Some of my friends began experiencing an increasing droppage rate too. For some that don't know the Korean wireless market, it has one of the highest wireless penetration rates in the world with almost 70% of the population utilizing cellphones. Within Seoul, it seems to be everyone from high school students to elderly, and they are not only using their cellphones for calls but messaging friends and taking photos. You can also use cellphones almost anywhere... from any floor of an office building to basements to subway stations to the countryside. So this droppage problem is not based on weak signals or accessiblity, but I'm guessing an overload of SKT's wireless network.