April 25, 2004

• You know what really sucks about spam? I mean, there's all that stuff you already know, like that it clogs up email servers and wastes lots of resources. And that people get conned by things like the Nigerian scam.

  But there's something else.

  I use Apple's Mail application for my email, and it has a pretty sophisticated Bayesian spam filter. That means it looks at each word in the email and compares it to two databases, one of words that occur in spam, and another of words that occur in non-spam emails. This comparison results in a score, and all the scores of all the words are averaged. This average determines if the email is marked as a spam or not.

  And what's sad about it is this: I just looked at my spam in-box, and it contained (among many others) an email with the single word 'Flourspar' as its subject. Flourspar is a lovely word, and I'd be very, very happy to get an email from someone with that subject. But from now on, forever and ever, such emails will be increasingly graded as spam. And why? Because some spammer thinks that he can fool my email program by using obscure words.

  I love obscure words. I live for obscure words. I love finding a word I don't know and looking it up and unlocking the meaning of what someone has written. But now that's all spam.

  • 6:59 pm
  • 4 Comments