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Thursday, November 10th, 2005
Daily Archive
Thu 10th Nov 2005
Daisy Duke
Posted mid-afternoon, filed under Cinema and Movies , Humour , Popular Music.
Spam has become the bane of the connected world. Whilst it is simple for a human to be able to decide if an object (email, comment, trackback) is Spam, it appears that computers have a harder time of it.
Perhaps the most surprising thing is that Spam exists at all. It relies on some sort of a payoff for the Spammer: for email Spam this must mean that people actually buy the crap they advertise.
My Gmail Spam folder is bulging as we speak: I seem to get around 400 Spam emails per month. Almost all of these are automatically picked up by Gmail’s Spam filter - but this filter also picks up several Ham (or legitimate emails) in the average month.
The majority of these are bounced emails: almost by default all bounced replies end up as Spam, since a common occurrence seems to be for Spammers to use real (other people’s) email addresses as the From: address, resulting in a whole bunch of Undeliverable Mail messages bouncing back to that person. Usually, this is not a problem, as most people I email I get the address right. However, as I have just taken over administration of a Sporting Organisation’s member list, I now get several bounced emails each time I do a mailout - I’m going through pruning addresses each time, but people’s addresses are often lapsing.
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