People who have applied to purchase Olympic tickets are reminded
to pay special attention to their email boxes, since the reply
letter delivered by the Beijing Olympics organizer, BOCOG, may
possibly be categorized as spam.
An employee with the BOCOG
ticket center displays an application table for the tickets
purchase. People can order more than?7 million tickets of the
Beijing Olympics before the Games kick off next August. (File
Photo: cnsphoto)
The Shanghai Youth Daily has reported that some
applicants, using email services offered by Hotmail.com, Yahoo
China and 263.com have complained about this issue.
A local citizen, surnamed Wang, told the paper that he
fortunately noticed the BOCOG letter in his hotmail box when
glancing through the spam column accidentally.
Wang was not the only person annoyed with the discreet filter
function of his email system. One of his mates, a user of 263.com,
was also close an erroneous deletion that he narrowly avoided by
recognizing the suffix of the sender's address:
"beijing2008.cn."
The BOCOG's reply letter is very important since it will confirm
whether a buyer's bid for Olympic tickets is valid or not.
Valid bidders are required to make payments through the Bank of
China no later than September 30 or their order will be nullified,
the report said.
IT technicians said that the problem probably results from
strict anti-spam programs designed by the email service providers.
They advise applicants to re-check their safety level settings in
their email boxes or add the domain name of the BOCOG to the
reliable list.
An employee with the BOCOG ticket center said that they would be
sure to reply to every ticket bidder, as long as the email address
is correct. Applicants who miss the letter by wrongly deleting
their mail will not be given a rain check, he added.
(CRI September 5, 2007)