America Online last month junked dozens of replies from Harvard University to its early applicants.
Scared off by the anthrax postal threat, the esteemed university was looking for an efficient way to inform Harvard hopefuls on whether they were accepted, denied or deferred.
Enter AOL, the leading Internet service provider, which blocked nearly 100 of the do-or-die letters, putting them in the dreaded “spam” file.
“This wasn’t exactly the instant response we intended,” said William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard.
Harvard used e-mail to notify nearly all of the 6,000 students who applied under the early-admissions guidelines.
Officials at AOL could not explain why, but said the company identified the Harvard messages as junk mail, the bane of Internet existence.
Certain characteristics, such as address, size and quantity, trigger automatic gatekeepers that block certain e-mail from reaching its intended target, said Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesman.