This morning, between fighting spam on a mailing list I manage, managing my own personal spam, and trying to get rid of all the blog-comment-spam, I burned more than 2 hours on spam. To the folks that claim that a few seconds deleting spam each day adds up, and represents the cost of spam, well, yeah, that's true, but the hundreds of hours a month spent by admins on spam management dwarfs that in comparison. I'm *really* steamed, but, there's really nothing at all that I can do about it. Which makes it worse.
The legislation that supposedly was going to reduce spam, which was passed earlier this year, has made absolutely no impact on the time that I spend dealing with spam. Spam volumes have been in the 90% range so far this year, and that's just what my mail server catches. The quantity that's getting through the filters continues to grow as spammers use better techniques to get around the filters. The kind of sick evil twisted mind that thinks that it's OK to alter message contents *specifically* to get it to people that are trying to block it, continues to boggle my mind. I mean, if I am specifically trying not to receive a certain kind of mail, doesn't that indicate to these morons that I'm not a reasonable target audience?
Must. Calm. Down.
Have you checked out Bayesian filtering techniques yet? They have been amazingly effective for me, and I REALLY hate spam.
Check out Paul Graham's page for some good info on it: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
Posted by: Bruce on February 21, 2004 01:16 PM