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Related fun story: several years ago I had an issue of my newsletter go into spam and spent ages taking links in and out to find out why. It turned out if you i

Related fun story: several years ago I had an issue of my newsletter go into spam and spent ages taking links in and out to find out why. It turned out if you included any URL that had a domain name starting with "0x", you were immediately sent to the sin bin. I even sent email between two fresh Gmail accounts with such a URL to confirm it. I reported the issue to Gmail, heard nothing, and it went away after a couple of years. I assume they hard coded an overzealous rule to catch people/scammers obscuring URLs with long IPs, but instead it even caught legitimate domains (though only developers tend to use such names).

oceanghost 5y ago
It's really easy for the AI to stumble into the simplest thing to do the job. I worked for a lab that did AI research in the late 90s and tried to write an AI that would automatically flag spam. My resources were comically limited-- a laptop and my own e-mails. No matter how many times I tweaked and ran the algorithm, it would always arrive at 73% accuracy-- because one of my inboxes was almost exclusively spam-- and every time the rule it would discover was to discard an e-mail when it had discovered juuusssttt enough of the domain name of the offending mailbox from the header. So, if the email address was someting@news.ycombinator.com it would discover any email containing the phrase "news.y" was more often then not, spam. This would immediately lead to a huge increase in accuracy but the algo would be stuck a at a local maximum since it hadn't really learned anything useful.