[Hidden-tech] So much junk mail!

Tim Boudreau niftiness at gmail.com
Tue Jul 21 14:44:59 EDT 2015


>
> My big problem with every antispam system I've ever tried--including GMail
> is inaccuracy in filtering.
>

Any system that tries to detect spam is going to be making a set of
trade-offs - either erring on the side of false-negatives (you get spam in
your inbox), or false-positives (legitimate mail gets filtered as spam).
It's an evolutionary war-of-attrition - any characteristic that reliably
identifies an email as spam is one spammers will change so it doesn't work
anymore.

The most effective solutions, such as GMail's, crowd-source the
identification of spam so that relatively few users see any given spam
message - that at least acknowledges the reality that there are no defining
characteristics of what-is-spam (and even there, different people have
different definitions of that - a one-size-fits-all solution is not going
to work).  But even there, it's still a war of attrition, since there are
ways to make emails differ enough that they won't be identified as "the
same message".

It's simply not a 100% solvable problem (short of paying someone to read
your inbox and manually filter the spam) - mainly you need to look at the
characteristics of the different ways of mitigating it, and decide what you
care about (some spam but few false-negatives, or no spam and some lost
messages) and pick a solution based on that.  There are no silver bullets.

-Tim
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