City Council's email handling still a shambles

When I was first elected as a Councillor in 2000, I pleaded with the Lib Dems to make email handling a priority of the then new-fangled 'e-government' agenda -all emails to service lines should be acknowledged automatically to indicate would be dealing with the email, then systems put in place to ensure every email received a suitable reply, i.e. all emails should be treated seriously, like the Council's handling of letters, only quicker and more efficient. These pleas were ignored.

Eight years later, the City Council's handling of emails appears to be as shambolic as ever - I'm trying to contact various Council officers about some ward issues, including urgently trying to get to the bottom of the planning situation at Tiverton House, and I am getting automated responses to indicate that my emails aren't being received again:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.

Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:

    xxxxx@cambridge.gov.uk

Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)

Technical details of temporary failure:
Unspecified Error (SENT_MAIL): Connection reset by peer

Last summer all my emails to the Council were ignored, for what turned out to be a completely spurious reason that never should have caused the Council to block them, and I have had other problems during the year getting responses to emails. If a letter was received by the Council, they would never think of putting it in a pile and ignoring it just because they didn't like the colour of the envelope, or reading a letter then not bothering to reply, but this if effectively what they do with emails on a far too frequent basis. No private company of any stature would allow their email handling to be as bad as this - the Council needs to get a grip. In the meantime, it would be helpful to know if anyone else is having trouble contacting the Council by email at the moment...

An Apology!

In the chaos of moving house and unpacking boxes, I haven't been able to chase up replies to emails sent to Council officers on various ward issues where I didn't get a reply, so there are a few people who have been waiting for too long for me to get back to them with a response or action plan - I can only apologise.

It appears that there is a problem with the way the City Council's email systems have been handling my emails, as a result recent mails have found their way into a Spam trap at the Council, and as a result they haven't been received or answered by the relevant people.

For the technical minded, the problem appears to be that my email signature includes a link to this blog. For reasons which were a bit unclear, a little while ago the anti-spam blacklists included the whole blogspot.com domain, so any emails including a link to a blogspot blog were at risk of being marked as spam. I think this problem has now been fixed, but the Council's Spam checkers are still blocking such emails.

This is potentially a very serious problem if it results in emails from members of the public being ignored by the Council. If there is anyone more clued up than me on spam filtering techniques reading, I'd be interested to know:

Is it reasonable for a spam filter to mark as spam any email that includes a blogspot.com web address?

The Council notifies users about potential spam emails not delivered with a summary list of from addresses and subject lines - this clearly isn't resulting in real emails being identified - does this policy sound reasonable or what more can be done to avoid genuine emails being mislaid?

Also, please let me know if you have sent emails to the City Council that don't appear to have had any response...