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Spam was never absolutely useless (except those special messages that check your address for availability), and some people do buy fake Rolex watches or cheap v

by mojuba 20y ago

Spam was never absolutely useless (except those special messages that check your address for availability), and some people do buy fake Rolex watches or cheap viagra pills. These offers may or may not be legal, and that's a different kind of problem. Unsolicited mail can be useful to someone, or otherwise it wouldn't exist at all. The real problem with spam, again, is that you will always receive it unless you clearly define what's important for you, or maybe what's not important - either way. Is that possible?

byrneseyeview 20y ago
Are you confusing gross and net use? Spammers value responses, and they can maximize those by either a) sending more spam, or b) getting more readers per message. I suspect that a) is finally becoming prohibitive because every new message trains all the Bayesian filters out there -- so it might work better for them to have fewer, weirder spams. And why just inject randomness into your message when you can inject usable order? The kind of people who read spam now are the kind of people who mass-forward jokes, so I can imagine a savvy spammer hiring comedians to write topical jokes, and appending a Viagra ad to end. They can 'beat' Bayesian filters by wrapping their spam in a message people will actually read and possibly forward.
- mojuba 20y ago
  I'm not talking about fighting spam. I'm trying to understand what is spam, because unless we understand that we won't be able to stop it. Let's say you got a message that offers SEO optimization for your web site, and you are not a SEO expert. The message has a decent business writing style, there's a signature with a decent-looking contact information with an postal address, email and everything. And the message invites you to click on a link. Is it spam or not?
  - byrneseyeview 20y ago
    Let's not make it binary. There are unsolicited commercial messages that we like; there are unsolicited noncommercial messages that we hate, and there are messages we wish we hadn't solicited -- I think filters should help us exclude email that isn't worth our time to read, and let us read the email that is (in fact, rather than a filter I'd hope we could some day have a 'prioritizer' that gave us interesting, critical stuff first and that deleted less meaningful messages if we ignored them long enough). Your SEO example illustrates what I'm talking about: it may be one of those offers that is worth the time it takes to consider it, so you'd hope that a spam filter wouldn't bounce it. On the other hand, I dislike SEO and worry that the users I'd get from it are lower-quality, so I wouldn't want to bother. This is why Bayesian filters can (and should) be somewhat personalized. An invitation to a conference might look like spam to 99.9% of people, but that other .10% shouldn't be punished for having strong but unconventional preferences.
    - mojuba 20y ago
      Ok, so you hope to teach your filter that you are not interested in SEO (because you know that "decent" companies rarely advertise themselves by sending spam). What if one day someone you know writes to you personally and offers just friendly to optimize your site because she thinks it doesn't show up in Google results? And let's say there will be some link, too. There's a chance this message will hit the thresholds and you won't see it. Another possibility could be that we are discussing this by email and we use plenty of those "bad" words. Now get it: Viagra, Rolex watches, SEO, efficient email advertising ;) I'm arguing that the only way to stop some really shitty mail is to force senders pay some price. Could be money or maybe some computational resources (say, MD5). The recipient (updated) would be able to see exactly how much time or other resources were spent on the given message. The more resources the more important the message. 1000 iterations of MD5? Ok, that must be someone I know personally. 10 iterations? Looks like an ad sent to many recipients. That's it. But computers become more and more powerful. Fine, in 5 years you will be able to raise your thresholds and require, say, 10,000 MD5 iterations to catch your attention.

by mojuba 20y ago

byrneseyeview 20y ago

Are you confusing gross and net use? Spammers value responses, and they can maximize those by either a) sending more spam, or b) getting more readers per message. I suspect that a) is finally becoming prohibitive because every new message trains all the Bayesian filters out there -- so it might work better for them to have fewer, weirder spams. And why just inject randomness into your message when you can inject usable order? The kind of people who read spam now are the kind of people who mass-forward jokes, so I can imagine a savvy spammer hiring comedians to write topical jokes, and appending a Viagra ad to end. They can 'beat' Bayesian filters by wrapping their spam in a message people will actually read and possibly forward.

mojuba 20y ago
I'm not talking about fighting spam. I'm trying to understand what is spam, because unless we understand that we won't be able to stop it. Let's say you got a message that offers SEO optimization for your web site, and you are not a SEO expert. The message has a decent business writing style, there's a signature with a decent-looking contact information with an postal address, email and everything. And the message invites you to click on a link. Is it spam or not?
- byrneseyeview 20y ago
  Let's not make it binary. There are unsolicited commercial messages that we like; there are unsolicited noncommercial messages that we hate, and there are messages we wish we hadn't solicited -- I think filters should help us exclude email that isn't worth our time to read, and let us read the email that is (in fact, rather than a filter I'd hope we could some day have a 'prioritizer' that gave us interesting, critical stuff first and that deleted less meaningful messages if we ignored them long enough). Your SEO example illustrates what I'm talking about: it may be one of those offers that is worth the time it takes to consider it, so you'd hope that a spam filter wouldn't bounce it. On the other hand, I dislike SEO and worry that the users I'd get from it are lower-quality, so I wouldn't want to bother. This is why Bayesian filters can (and should) be somewhat personalized. An invitation to a conference might look like spam to 99.9% of people, but that other .10% shouldn't be punished for having strong but unconventional preferences.
  - mojuba 20y ago
    Ok, so you hope to teach your filter that you are not interested in SEO (because you know that "decent" companies rarely advertise themselves by sending spam). What if one day someone you know writes to you personally and offers just friendly to optimize your site because she thinks it doesn't show up in Google results? And let's say there will be some link, too. There's a chance this message will hit the thresholds and you won't see it. Another possibility could be that we are discussing this by email and we use plenty of those "bad" words. Now get it: Viagra, Rolex watches, SEO, efficient email advertising ;) I'm arguing that the only way to stop some really shitty mail is to force senders pay some price. Could be money or maybe some computational resources (say, MD5). The recipient (updated) would be able to see exactly how much time or other resources were spent on the given message. The more resources the more important the message. 1000 iterations of MD5? Ok, that must be someone I know personally. 10 iterations? Looks like an ad sent to many recipients. That's it. But computers become more and more powerful. Fine, in 5 years you will be able to raise your thresholds and require, say, 10,000 MD5 iterations to catch your attention.