Solid Oak, the maker of Cybersitter Web filtering software, is under fire from a woman who says the company launched an email attack against her after she sent the firm a critical letter. A company spokesman offered a semi-denial of the accusation.
Sarah Salls, a Web designer and mother of two, sent an email to Solid Oak on Wednesday that accused the company of carrying out censorship in its filtering software.
After the email was rejected by four Solid Oak email accounts (including support, feedback, and the CEO's personal account), Salls says, she was mailbombed on Thursday. Her account received over 800 emails from support@solidoak.com, quoting her letter with the subject line "re: your crap" and a message "Do not send us any more e-mail!"
Solid Oak denied Salls' allegation. But not flatly.
"We know absolutely nothing about this - I can't imagine that this would happen," spokesman Marc Kanter said Friday.
He conceded, however, that something might have happened - by accident. He said the company has a new automatic response email filtering system that Solid Oak is beta-testing and that it "could have made a mistake."
Salls says her Internet service provider, Massachusetts-based Valinet, is consulting both its lawyers and upstream provider MCI about the incident.
"It's so unprofessional - all companies are going to get some kind of criticism of their product at some point or another. It goes with the territory," said Salls. "I just want to bring some awareness to this, and I guess I'll just have to use my big mouth."
