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

Wed Jun 18 21:36:28 UTC 2003

> 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.
>
I hope I never get your "legitimate" email. :) Since about 100 messages I practically
stopped visiting the Junk folder every now and then because no false positives
occurred. Just for the sake of this message, I peeked into the folder and scrolled
trough the last ~300 messages and all spam.

About one in 50 does not get flagged and this stream has already gone through
the basic checks like that sender needs to have a legit domain name and such.

So I´m happy camper and I hope that legislation catches up with spammers
before they figure out a surefire way to defeat Baynesians.

Pete