[clue-talk] Triaging spam

[Angelo Bertolli]

Also I wanted to add:

I do agree that the way to attack spam is to base it on the content that 
they're trying to sell.  I had a long discussion with someone before, 
and I'm still standing by this point of view:  prevent their 
advertisement at all cost.  It's the heart of what they do.

Angelo Bertolli wrote:

> 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.
>>  
>>
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