Doug's Inner Net News
News and views from a software developer's perspective
Saturday, February 22, 2003
How will people's behavior change as a result of spam? Will people learn how to write a message differently so that it will not get caught in a spam filter? Will people learn to use plus aliases? Will they learn to include special words in the message, such as the recipient's first and last name, so that the message will not be caught as a false positive? Will they come to understand that email is unreliable because of spam filters? If so, what will they do when a message is really important? How long should you wait to resend it if you don't get a response? Should you always respond to a message, so as to acknowledge you received it? If a message is really important, and you have more than one email address for a recipient, should you send it to all the addresses?
Another idea about filtering spam. To reduce the occurrence of false positives, search in the body of a message for certain words. If you find those words, declare the message to be non-spam. The key words could include names of your company's products, names of family members, organizations that you belong to, and so on. A good idea would be to include one or more unique words in your signature, and search for those words in incoming messages. If you find those words in an incoming message, then it is likely that that message is a reply to a message that you sent.
News and views from a software developer's perspective
Saturday, February 22, 2003How will people's behavior change as a result of spam? Will people learn how to write a message differently so that it will not get caught in a spam filter? Will people learn to use plus aliases? Will they learn to include special words in the message, such as the recipient's first and last name, so that the message will not be caught as a false positive? Will they come to understand that email is unreliable because of spam filters? If so, what will they do when a message is really important? How long should you wait to resend it if you don't get a response? Should you always respond to a message, so as to acknowledge you received it? If a message is really important, and you have more than one email address for a recipient, should you send it to all the addresses?
7:48:46 AM 
Another idea about filtering spam. To reduce the occurrence of false positives, search in the body of a message for certain words. If you find those words, declare the message to be non-spam. The key words could include names of your company's products, names of family members, organizations that you belong to, and so on. A good idea would be to include one or more unique words in your signature, and search for those words in incoming messages. If you find those words in an incoming message, then it is likely that that message is a reply to a message that you sent.
7:38:26 AM