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I'd be interested in how anyone could defend that silently discarding email after "after accepting the e-mail for delivery" based on a defective filter is acceptable behaviour.

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I believe that the argument goes that processing e-mail in spam filters can take some time, so they accept it and queue it for analysis.

Sure, and if it fails move it to the spam folder. In the article Microsoft are discarding emails because the sender hasn't got much of a reputation yet. That's a very weak reason.

If storing vaguely suspected spam is intolerably expensive then maybe just keep a list of discarded messages (sender, title and date). At least users can see what's happening.

They could still at the very least send a notification email back when the deferred analysis rejects the message. Email is multi-hop anyway in the general case.

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