Remember when we told you that McAfee Recklessly and Wrongly Accuses Yahoo Store Owners of Malware and Spam? That situation was resolved, sort of. McAfee has at least removed the blanket flag on Yahoo Stores and now merely says "unknown" for most stores, even though many of those stores are paying McAfee for their security services.

Well, it seems that Trend Micro is up to the same thing. They were blocking Chris Lang's site. Not because of anything that he did, but because of a false positive.

Trend Micro will block your site in the browser, block your web traffic at the server level, your URLs in any emails and send your emails to the Trend Micro spam folder if you make the mistakes that I did. It was not Trend Micro%u2019s fault, my payment software or anything I did. Trend Micro blocked me because I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

So why should you care about Trend Micro? Have you even heard of them?

They're the 4th most popular PC application software package, according to CNET. And getting flagged by Trend Micro makes it much more likely that a user will mark your email as spam, which then cascades through the various spam blocking services. Before you know it, you can't communicate with your customers who use Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc. It's pretty devastating.

Why do they Get Away With This?

Chris was quite magnanimous when he said that it wasn't Trend Micro's fault. Frankly, I don't see the difference between companies like Trend Micro and McAfee and the person that stands in front of a bricks and mortar business with a sign that says "This business is a fraud!" and then claims that they were merely standing in front of the wrong business, by mistake. McAfee and Trend Micro have cost people that we know thousands of dollars. Why there hasn't been a class action suit against these companies befuddles me.