HP exec 'offended' by my conclusion that he deleted a SF official's e-mail

In case you haven't been following Testbed this last 7-10 days, an Australian researcher released evidence that laser printers might be hazardous to your health, finding a good number of HP LaserJets that were sources of potentially carcinogenic emissions (other manufacturers were scathed as well). In the course of discrediting the research's "bold claims" and comparing the emissions of its printers to those of ordinary toasters, HP fired back claiming that its printers pose no known health risks.

The Ozzie researcher returned volley basically saying HP is conveniently omitting newer data regarding public health standards. Along the way a public health official in San Francisco e-mailed Tuan Tran, the HP executive who refuted the findings, a detailed inquiry requesting more data to support HP's tall claims. One of his concerns was whether the emissions contain Carbon Black -- an substance found in some brands of laser printer toner and one that, to the extent it might be present in the air found in SF city offices, is subject to the oversight of California state law. That public health official sent me evidence that his e-mail was deleted without ever having been read and I wrote about that here on Testbed.

In an e-mail that I received late Friday that expressed his disappointment with my post, Tran blamed his spam filters for automatically deleting the inquiry. Wrote Tran:

I just read your blog entry and wanted to let you know directly that I am very disappointed by the conclusions that you drew on your blog from an automatically deleted email by a SPAM filter. You should know that I never received Ray's email in my in tray and would never delete an inquiry like that without ensuring that someone from HP provided a satisfactory response. We take our customers and their concerns very seriously at HP and I am offended that you characterized it otherwise. In the future, please ensure that you track down the appropriate facts before jumping to a characterization of motive - especially mine.

In their comments to my original post, several ZDNet readers suspected that an overzealous spam filter was at work. But does that let HP and Tran off the hook? (you can answer in the poll below) Spam and spam filters have been around a while and it's a known fact -- particularly in the technology community that Tran is a part of -- that most spam filtering systems suck because none are 100 percent accurate. When it comes to adjusting their "knobs and levers," there's no single setting that blocks out all the actual spam while not blocking some legitimate mail too.

Now, I have no idea how HP's anti-spam solutions work. But most anti-spam systems do not delete e-mail automatically. Most shuffle it off to a junk mail folder -- an event that most e-mail systems I know of do not technically consider to be a deletion. The reason they work this way is to give users an opportunity to review the suspected spams to make sure nothing legitimate got filtered as well. According to the audit trail that was sent to me, the e-mail in question was deleted 15 minutes after it was sent. Maybe HP's e-mail system simply deletes suspected spam. If so, that's just a bad idea. Or maybe HP's e-mail system works the way others do where the end-user must deliberately "empty" the junk-mail folder for suspected spam to get deleted. However an e-mail from a government official ended up being deleted, the question is (also, see an update below the poll):

[poll id=17]

Update: One ZDNet reader responded to this post to say:

I don't know whether HP's spam filters work exactly the same, but Agilent (used to be HP's scientific equipment arm) still use HP's e-mail infrastructure, and spam mail isn't autodeleted there, merely marked by Brightmail with a SMTP header of 'x-bmifolder' and passed on as normal.