Stupid Spam 6
Spam is the scourge of our age. What really baffles me is why so much spam has so many spelling errors. You'd think they'd at least run their crap through a spell checker first.
Or maybe that's part of their strategy. I have a gmail account. The gmail filter seems to be pretty smart. I've even added a few filters on my own to catch ones that always seem to get through. (For example, anything starting with "Dear Sir" is tossed immediately... so don't send me an email that way).
But gmail's rules are pretty limiting. I can only specify words or phrases in certain email fields (subject, body, recipient, etc.).
I wish they'd let me run a ruby method like this whenever an email is received:
def spam?(email)
email.body.all_caps? || email.body.spelling_errors.count > 2
end
I'm pretty sure that would stop all of the spam I get.
And no, I'm not afraid of missing legitimate email:
- Most of my friends know how to spell quite well.
- Any friend of mine who sends me an email with more than two spelling errors doesn't deserve a response right away.
- Legitimate people will try again. Or they'll eventually call me on my cell or (gasp!) landline.
Aren't these two rules obvious spam catchers? Why can't gmail's filter be this smart?
What rules what you would like add to your spam blocking service, if only you could?
Yes, spammers deserve no better than the electric chair, in my humble opinion. If you see a spammer crossing the street beat him to dead.
On the other hand, we should not give up and raise our tolerance for false-positives. The e-mailing protocols are so crappy that even those moron spammers know how to circumvent them. We allow for more, they will come with more.
The whole idea behind Paul Graham's use of Bayesian-based filters is to not manually create a black list of words or patterns. Because every rule can be broken. So we need to 'see' it through and raise the bars against them. Even if the text is error-free and don't have any suspicious wording, we can still see its headers, we can still filter more that what meets the eye.
I don't know what kind of filtering Gmail uses but for me it works reasonably well. I just emptied a spam box with almost a thousand spam e-mails. For this week alone. Maybe 1 or 2 still break free into my Inbox everyday, but I can deal 1 or 2. The more they analyze it through the more the quality will raise - hopefully.
What I would like to see are the sendmail guys to patch their product to allow for more protection againt spam. All SMTP, IMAP and all other e-mail servers should be patched to block more and more, even if the e-mail takes longer to be delivered, it would be acceptable.
@AkitaOnRails: Really? Spammers deserve death? Have the ads for sexual enhancement damaged your sensibilities THAT much? Are spammers worse than rapists, child molesters, and drug dealers, who don't face punishment nearly as severe as death?
Interesting that GMail's spam filter isn't working as well for you. I get between 6,000 and 10,000 spams per month to my e-mail account and maybe 4-7 get through a month. That's pretty impressive you ask me. (And I don't have any special rules added, either.)
Jeremy: I'm going to play devil's advocate here. Let's look at the numbers.
The current statistic for the number of spams sent per day is estimated at 90 billion spams per day. Let's say anti-spam efforts catch 95% of that.
That still leaves 4.5 billion spams reaching in-boxes around the world.
If each person spends only ONE SECOND doing something with that e-mail (reading the subject and deleting it), that means spammers are wasting 142 YEARS of time every single day.
With an average lifespan of around 70 years, that means spammers are wasting two lifetimes of people's time PER DAY.
Two lifetimes per day.
Per day.
So are they worse than rapists, child molesters, and drug dealers? Well, looking at the above numbers, I think we're past those lowlifes and into the realm of murderers.
laugh You must not receive a lot of e-mails from sales and marketing types or people on the go. While I applaud your desire to hold the world to a higher standard, and I do agree that standards are slipping, it's just not practical to filter out e-mails based on spelling errors. I get e-mails from people banging out a response on their Blackberry where words are misspelled or quite often I'll receive help requests from paying customers and if I ignored their e-mails because of some spelling errors I'd be missing out on a revenue stream.
There's not much I'd do with spam filters these days except maybe send an electric shock to the person that sent them for each one blocked. GMail's filter is pretty top notch, maybe 1 spam e-mail a week makes it through out of a few thousand.
@Shawn: I give out a different email address for business... I was just talking about my personal gmail address. Sorry, I should have mentioned that. But I do like the electric shock idea. :-)
As is shown in the writings of Galileo, it remains a mystery why the objects in space and time would be falsified; as I have elsewhere shown, the employment of the empirical objects in space and time (and we can deduce that this is true) can not take account of our ideas.