OT: question re. the Volume of unwanted email (fwd)

Wed Jun 18 21:09:42 UTC 2003

Petri Helenius wrote:
> 
> Isn´t "highlight and hit delete" exactly what has been implemented since
> Mozilla 1.3 and works with almost perfect accuracy after you give it a few
> dozen messages to build up the "good and bad" database with?
> 

Actually, I find that 1.3 and 1.4 still have issues with determining 
spam. While fairly decent, one still has to go through looking for false 
positives. The other issue is that spammers have been doing a good job 
at designing emails to fool filters. I'm starting to see more and more 
spam designed to defeat Baynesian filters. By including "good" words in 
their emails, they either make good words spammy so that you get more 
FP's or they make their email clean enough that it's still in your 
inbox. The worst part of it is that spam is quickly becoming unreadable, 
so that legitimate emails that are readable are the emails more likely 
filtered.

-Jack