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

  • From: Jack Bates
  • Date: Wed Jun 18 17:08:37 2003

Petri Helenius wrote:
Isnīt "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