Sending e-mail can be a struggle if your name has a 4-letter word

I almost never heard from Craig Cockburn, which would have been a shame.

He's a nice guy with some interesting thoughts about technology and whether it's useful enough for those who use it.

But Cockburn wrote to me. By e-mail.

See, Cockburn has a problem with e-mail. Or more to the point, e-mail has a problem with him. His e-mail doesn't always get where it's going. He first stumbled upon all this more than a year ago when he tried to update his Hotmail account. The online registration insisted that his profile contained characters that were unacceptable.

``After an extensive debate with Hotmail about this,'' says Cockburn, ``the obvious explanation was the first four letters of my last name was one of the censored words.''

Never mind that his name is his name and it has been all his life. Never mind that it is a noble and popular name in Scotland, where he lives. Never mind that it's pronounced Co-burn.

While Cockburn's problem might seem amusing to those of us who aren't him, it actually points to a bigger worry.

``I've been using e-mail for 21 years,'' says Cockburn, who's long been a programmer and Web hand, ``and at no time in that long time has e-mail been as unreliable as it is now.''

For years we've complained about spam. Smart thinkers have written about how the flood of spam will one day kill e-mail. It just won't be worth the trouble anymore.

But now along comes Cockburn with a story that shows that the cure, while not worse than the disease, is at least adding to the pain.

Sure, there are good spam filters and bad spam filters, but it only takes one bad filter in the digital pipeline to muzzle Cockburn.

``Quite legitimate e-mail from quite legitimate people is being bounced or even disappearing without a bounce message,'' says Cockburn, who works for the Scottish Tourist Board.

When Cockburn first wrote to the Mercury News, his e-mail was spit back by the paper's filter. Through perseverance and by at least once spelling his name C0ckburn, he was able to reach me. But should he really have to mangle his own name just to speak his piece?

``I'm not asking for something unreasonable here,'' he argues. ``I just want my e-mail to look like it's coming from me, not some ridiculous name.''

And it's not just Hotmail and the Mercury News. Cockburn, whose title is senior IT application specialist, has had trouble with his own employer.

``We have a content filter,'' he says, ``and for some reason that absolutely no one can explain, it bans the world `specialist.' ''

(Cockburn later wrote to say he now knows why the word was blocked. It contains the letters ``cialis,'' as in the Viagra-like drug regularly pushed by spammers.)

But Cockburn is not one to curse the darkness. He's given some thought to inscrutable spam filters and he has a few ideas about building a better spam trap.

``I think obviously there is a technical solution to this,'' Cockburn says.

It's a little early, he says, to get specific, other than to say he'd build on existing systems and that he hopes to work with an existing spam-fighting company.

Sure, one day there could be a financial payoff for

Cockburn.

But more important, his work would give him a chance to save his good name.