My ISP is applying "an intelligent spam filter" to emails. Fortunately all
emails are still downloaded to our in box but with
*** SPAM ***
added to the front of the subject line to those the filter identifies as
spam.
So far it's identified three lace-chat messages and a personal one from Clay
as spam.
My Mac's OSX (Panther, and Jaguar before it) has something similiar, though internal (ie not received through an ISP), and calls it "junk" instead of "spam". Its "intelligence" lies in its ability to learn. There ought to be, somewhere, an "undo" function, so that you can "un-spam" the messages which had been "tagged" incorrectly. After a couple of times, it'll learn (or should, but they're not all that brilliant <g>)
I've not had much problem with the Mac in that respect -- it "junked" only two legitimate messages in over a year (one of them a bill from my ISP; what a smart beast the Mac is <g>). It errs on the side of caution though -- tends to think some of the spam is legitimate (especially, I noticed, the spam coming out of Poland, with user names like dorotka, anetka, etc . It must be thinking that anything in Polish is, automaticaly, a treasure to me <g>)
I did have a problem like yours with the ISP-provided spam filter (Postini) a few years back, which is why I opted out of it. But I think I'll resubscribe to it before my trip to Europe, giving it 5-6 weeks to learn. For one thing, 3-4 yrs ago, when my ISP first offered it, I had no idea how to train it, but now I might be able to. For another thing, Martha (Krieg) says Postini has improved vastly since the early days; it's smarter and learns faster.
But the best thing is that the messages Postini "tags" as spam need never reach my account in the ISP's "holding pen" from which I download to my own 'puter; they're quarantined elsewhere. I will still have access to them (via a website) to vet them and re-route the mistakenly trashed ones, but they won't clog up my personal account during my 4 week absence. Which is a real possibility, even though I'll be unsubscribing both from chat and lace; in the past week, the number of spam messages I've been receiving has more than doubled suddenly; up to some 60-70 a day. And a lot of them are fairly KB-heavy (HTML; somehow, nobody peddles longer penis in plain text...)
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
