[clue-talk] Triaging spam

[Angelo Bertolli]

Well even though I think it's possible to stop most spam, I have to 
disagree with him on this point:
"If you hired someone to read your mail and discard the spam, they would 
have little trouble doing it."

I don't know if his philosophy depends on this, but unfortunately this 
point probably only applies to most tech people who realize the harm of 
ads.  For example, some of the clients I have email set up for actually 
subscribe to things that look like spam.  And throwing those out (which 
I did with the filter) is considered a false positive to them.  Even 
going through by hand, I couldn't find which emails they were talking 
about as being non-spam.  The problem is... there are people out there 
who like what most of us would call spam.  And unfortunately, the 
definition of spam is largely dependant on the receiver's opinion of the 
content.

>
>On another side note, has everyone read the writeup by Paul Graham? This
>made it into his _Hackers & Painters_. 
>
>http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
>
>I like his observation about how much more the statistical analysis would
>show about "words" like "c0ck" vs. what he might be able to do with
>keywords.  Even with his holier-than-thou attitude towards Java, I have a
>lot of respect for the guy...
>
>I think the very fact that spammers purposely mangle words will make a
>Bayesian filter work better. I don't know how well they will handle the
>newest trend from the scum-sucking bottom feeders, though - ASCII art. 
>
>  
>