Email and Spam
Don Park thinks spam is killing email, and he may be right:
I used to feel comfortable with reliability of e-mails. When I send something to somebody, I felt reasonably sure that it will be delivered and read. That is no longer true today even with wide use of spam filters. When I send an e-mail now, I no longer feel sure of it being read by the receipient.
He goes on to discuss the ins and outs of how he classifies email that makes it through his filters; suffice to say that the volume is still high enough that a lot gets blown away with barrely a glance.
I actually don't use a spam filer; instead, I have filters for all my mail lists and people I expectmail from, and that all gets organized into folders. What's left in inbox is almost all spam, and gets manually deleted without a lot of detailed scanning. This is dangerous though - as the Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk, I get a fair number of mails from people I don't know and have never met - more than once I've had to scan back through the trash for mails I deleted. I don't have any faith at all in digital signatures; I'me sure the spammers will find a way through that as well. Email, once a highly useful tool for communication, is getting more and more like regular mail every day...
Comments
Presumed spam
[David Buck] August 17, 2003 20:52:57.358
I know of one person named Susan Love who sent an e-mail to a vendor about a license for their software to use at their company's hot site - an emergency backup site that's hot-synced with the main site and can be used in case of disasters. After not receiving a reply, she called the vendor who claimed that they never received the e-mail. As it turns out, the e-mail was in their trash bin. It came across as: Hot site Love,Susan Would you delete this e-mail without reading it?
Disk space is cheap...
[John Dougan] August 17, 2003 21:45:27.449
I've found that just I don't bother throwing away old spam anymore, I just file it by quarter. That way I've got feedstock for training adaptive spam filters and if I should screw up classifying the spam I can always reach it. Disk space is down to $1/Gigabyte and the last 5 years of work email, with spam included comes to less than 2 GB. So in the end it is cheaper for me to just save everything and spend less time worrying about losing non-spam.
Re: Email and Spam
[Reinout] August 18, 2003 3:42:35.102
Comment on Email and Spam by Reinout
I use to handle my email like you do , but couldn't keep up with the spam manually. I started using Spambayes a couple of months ago. At first I only let it mark my spam but within days I decided it was doing a more reliable job than I did manually, so now spam is moved to it's own box automatically.
Recommended.