The perfect spam filter

Spam is a problem we are all too familiar with. I have stopped using my primary email account (thomas @ korte . de) some time ago - it was simply to much to take. My Yahoo Mail was still very spam-free - and that after using it for some 4 years already. Recently - probably since about 6 month - I noticed a dramatic increase in spam. And I am not talking about the sneaky spam e.g. Subject: RE: your credit card was declined - I am talking about penis enlargement, viagra, and (surprise) porn - in any way and shape …. Spam that seems to be rather easily detected. I wonder if Yahoo or for that matter any web-based email provider has a real incentive to block spam. After all, the CPM based banner impression is served on any email.

This week things got worse. I enabled the Yahoo spam “”protection”". WHAT A MISTAKE. Yes, it does filter a lot of junk - BUT, it also filters about every personal email I get. My relationship was about to take a serious hit (not really, but the story reads much better like that) when I kept telling my girlfriend that she did not send me any emails: “Sorry, I did not get any emails from you in weeks - which email did you send it to? Can you cc my work email in the future …”. Well, to make a long story short - Yahoo filtered almost ALL my personal emails in the junk folder.

I really wonder about the engineers who developed this! How difficult is it to filter spam in a collaborative network like Yahoo, where thousands of people mark messages as spam. Here is what you do:
1. filter emails with offensive text - easy.
2. filter emails with identical text that is delivered to hundreds of people - easy, but it might include newsletters.
3. filer emails that are reported as spam by the human spam reporters - once 100 people marked it as spam, it probably is spam.
4. don’t filer emails from senders that I have opened and not marked as spam

Maybe I am missing something about the complexity of the problem??

Oh, one more
5. when in doubt, DO NOT filter emails - the price to pay is not justified. I’d rather delete some spam emails that made it through the filter than missing another email from my girlfriend; really from any friend.

Finally, if a Yahoo developer reads this:
STOP FILTERING ORKUT.COM EMAILS - I LIKE THEM (sorry, I had to yell that)

January 22, 2004 | Filed Under Thoughts 

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