On 01/28/2010 11:57 AM, Michel Jullian wrote:
> > PS Strange how Gmail's algorithms consider some messages are spam for > some people and not for others. Personalized spam blocking! This goes to the heart of the Spam problem. The worst difficulty isn't the ladies from China who supposedly want to crawl into bed with anyone who can read a few kanji characters. They can be blocked across the board, and nobody will complain; furthermore, spam filters can recognize them without a lot of trouble. Rather, the big problem is the legitimate businesses that are just a little too enthusiastic about sending adverts through email. One piece of commercial email from every legitimate business in the United States, sent to every email address in the United States, would be tantamount to a DOS attack on the entire Internet. But, a lot of that commercial email is considered *useful* by a lot of people, at the same time that a lot of other people consider it SPAM. So, one-size-fits-all spam filters simply can't work. Furthermore, since the fringier businesses include word salad in their spam, "trainable" filters are hard to make work, quite aside from the tedious training required and the high false-positive rate of such filters. T-bird's built in spam filter, for instance, is totally worthless; it worked acceptably when first released but the use of word salads, which was discovered some time after T-bird's filter was added, have completely killed its value. Finally, I don't know what planet you guys who think the spam problem has abated are living on. I just checked my spam reports from PObox and I'm seeing about 50 or 60 rejects a day. That's too many to go through comfortably on a daily basis, and the false-positive rate is *very* low, so I inevitably let the hand-checking slide. But the false-positive rate isn't zero. An unfortunate consequence is that I've lost important messages to mis-tuned spam filters; that's happened within the past year. My webmaster box, which comes directly to me without filtering, gets spam traffic on the same order, and it's almost impossible to pick anything useful out of it. I just had a lengthy *phone* exchange with someone this morning who had failed to receive an important email from me. After sending him about six more copies (with the important document attached each time), none of which made it through, he finally had the wit to send me a message, to which I replied, with said document attached once more. That *finally* made it through. It seems pretty obvious that some spam filter somewhere was blocking all my email to him, until he finally emailed me; then whatever filter it was decided I was a "friend" rather than "foe" and let my mail through. He doesn't realize that what he's got is a SPAM problem, but that's surely what it is. All in all, things haven't collapsed completely, the way many people expected; they're still limping along. But none the less, this situation sucks royally, and as far as I can see from the reject counts, the volume has *not* decreased. If anything, it's rising.
