Wednesday, January 22, 2003

The simple truth is, I don't have a spam problem anymore. I use SpamSieve, a very nice statistical filter for Mac OS X. Very large numbers of spams get routed every day to my spam folder. Only a very few per day get through to my in-box, and they are not enough to be construed as a problem. "False positives," where a legitimate email is classified as spam, are exceedingly rare and as of yet have never involved an email from a person. Automated-but-still-useful emails have been misclassified, such as newsletters; a situation that is very easily fixable by reclassifying them as non-spam. From then on the filter "knows" to let that newsletter through. Spam-creators are getting smarter in the sense that they are obviously trying to reword their spams so as to avoid obviously spammy keywords such as "porn." Nevertheless, this trend has not accomplished much to date as far as I can see. It will be interesting to watch the battle between spammers and spam filter creators play itself out. 9:38:30 AM    comment

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