onsider it the collateral damage of the Spam Wars.

Tidbits, a popular 12-year-old electronic newsletter about Macintosh and Internet news, has often been inadvertently rejected by e-mail server computers around the world the last two years. Why? Because spam-filtering software based on keywords does not understand sarcasm and double entendres, and often takes legitimate words out of context.

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Recently a Tidbit newsletter describing spam contained the word "Viagra," which resulted in the newsletter itself being tagged as spam by e-mail filters. Ten percent of Tidbits' 38,000 electronic copies of its newsletter were bounced back.

Another recent Tidbits offense was using "blond" in the same sentence as "undress" in a description of suggestive pop-under ads. "It's like fishing for tuna and catching dolphins," said Adam C. Engst, the publisher of Tidbits. "You don't know what else you are going to catch in that net."

Clumsy e-mail blocking has drawn anger for years, as when irate breast cancer patients flamed AOL in 1995 for putting the world "breast" on its e-mail blacklist — a decision that AOL quickly reversed. But more recently the unintended consequences of e-mail filtering have emerged as systems administrators have thrown up spam defenses.

Now, rejection notices like "Contains unacceptable language (rule: FORBID—GNTLIA: 'breast')" have become a weekly headache for Geoff Duncan, the subscription manager for Tidbits.

"This is not what Tidbits pays me to do," said Mr. Duncan, who spent 30 hours dealing with grumpy subscribers and unhelpful mail server administrators in the week after the Viagra message went out.

Tidbits editors have tried to be careful in their references. Viagra, for example, became "a well-known Pfizer drug for men, technically known as sildenafil citrate."

But the spam filters were not amused. More than one of every six copies of the newsletter were bounced back.