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Yes. I suddenly just started getting tons and tons of German spam. I tried Googling for a way to block mail in a language or from a country, but apparently th

Yes. I suddenly just started getting tons and tons of German spam. I tried Googling for a way to block mail in a language or from a country, but apparently the technology just isn't there to do so(/s). Getting rid of Russian and German mail would completely fix my spam problem.

seanw444 5y ago
Nah they'd have to develop a whole system that can automatically detect a text's language. For example, to recognize what language to translate to/from without having to be manually selected. We're out of luck until then.
- steanne 5y ago
  oh no, they have it. i know they do: i get a lot of spam in french because of my user name, and not much else on that account. i recently had legit email in english be flagged as spam and gmail had a "why is this message marked spam?" note on it that said it was not in my usual language.
  - seanw444 5y ago
    I was being facetious ;) Google definitely has the tech. It's in Google Translate already. It will fill in the drop-down for what language to translate to/from when you start typing.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  Almost certainly the majority of the anti spam system at any large mailbox flogger is a bayesian classifier. Tell your mailbox what you don't want (mark as spam) and it will gradually learn. It does not care whether it is in German or Cyrillic, it will learn the characteristics gradually. It does require effort. If you teach a bayesian classifier with around 500 ham and 500 spam, you will see very little spam and if you continue to teach it, it gets better and better. I am assuming that is what Google give you but if I was them, that's what I'd do. I'd also add a few lists and stuff but the gold standard is a trained bayesian filter. You get to do the training, there is no shortcut. I suspect that if you don't mark a mail as spam then it will be implicitly marked as ham. Getting an efficient spammy feedback mechanism working in a mail system is surprisingly hard. Email changes at each hop as it gets from source MUA via MTAs to the destination MUA. Headers are added at a minimum at each hop. Anyway, that's my problem - not yours! So, no they do not need to run up a language detector but given that Google have an online translation service, I doubt that would be tricky. That sort of thing may be added to an "enterprise" offering. Try teaching your mailbox what you want and don't want and see if the clever buggers at Google have actually mastered the basics. They probably have but you need to do the work to provide the data that corresponds to showing what you want.
gerdesj 5y ago
You could use a full fat client eg Thunderbird or Evolution, Outlook or whatever and use that to do some filtering through an IMAP connection. However that does rather negate the convenience. You could also try another provider or DIY. Another option is something like Mimecast which you put in front of Gmail - https://www.mimecast.com/products/platform-selection/mimecast-services-for-g-suite/ https://www.mimecast.com/products/platform-selection/mimecas... If you use a mass email provider, you get a rather generic experience. How on earth are Goog n co supposed to work out what you consider to be spam or UBE? I imagine that you get some basic filters (naughty words and a few IP deny lists) and a tokenizer n bayesian classifier that does the really hard work. Keep tagging the crap mail as spam and after a while it should learn, that for you: German - probably unwanted, Cyrillic - probably unwanted etc. Unfortunately you don't get to see under the hood/bonnet to understand what is actually going on. I recommend that you stick with manually notifying spam for a while and see if that works - you need a lot of samples. If Goog allows you mark ham then use that too but I suspect they implicitly mark a mail as ham if you don't mark it as spam. When I say a lot of samples, I think you need at least 200 ham and 200 spam samples minimum, ideally 500 each and the more the better. Moving to another mass mail supplier will almost certainly not help.

seanw444 5y ago

Nah they'd have to develop a whole system that can automatically detect a text's language. For example, to recognize what language to translate to/from without having to be manually selected. We're out of luck until then.

steanne 5y ago
oh no, they have it. i know they do: i get a lot of spam in french because of my user name, and not much else on that account. i recently had legit email in english be flagged as spam and gmail had a "why is this message marked spam?" note on it that said it was not in my usual language.
- seanw444 5y ago
  I was being facetious ;) Google definitely has the tech. It's in Google Translate already. It will fill in the drop-down for what language to translate to/from when you start typing.
gerdesj 5y ago
Almost certainly the majority of the anti spam system at any large mailbox flogger is a bayesian classifier. Tell your mailbox what you don't want (mark as spam) and it will gradually learn. It does not care whether it is in German or Cyrillic, it will learn the characteristics gradually. It does require effort. If you teach a bayesian classifier with around 500 ham and 500 spam, you will see very little spam and if you continue to teach it, it gets better and better. I am assuming that is what Google give you but if I was them, that's what I'd do. I'd also add a few lists and stuff but the gold standard is a trained bayesian filter. You get to do the training, there is no shortcut. I suspect that if you don't mark a mail as spam then it will be implicitly marked as ham. Getting an efficient spammy feedback mechanism working in a mail system is surprisingly hard. Email changes at each hop as it gets from source MUA via MTAs to the destination MUA. Headers are added at a minimum at each hop. Anyway, that's my problem - not yours! So, no they do not need to run up a language detector but given that Google have an online translation service, I doubt that would be tricky. That sort of thing may be added to an "enterprise" offering. Try teaching your mailbox what you want and don't want and see if the clever buggers at Google have actually mastered the basics. They probably have but you need to do the work to provide the data that corresponds to showing what you want.

gerdesj 5y ago

You could use a full fat client eg Thunderbird or Evolution, Outlook or whatever and use that to do some filtering through an IMAP connection. However that does rather negate the convenience. You could also try another provider or DIY. Another option is something like Mimecast which you put in front of Gmail - https://www.mimecast.com/products/platform-selection/mimecast-services-for-g-suite/ https://www.mimecast.com/products/platform-selection/mimecas... If you use a mass email provider, you get a rather generic experience. How on earth are Goog n co supposed to work out what you consider to be spam or UBE? I imagine that you get some basic filters (naughty words and a few IP deny lists) and a tokenizer n bayesian classifier that does the really hard work. Keep tagging the crap mail as spam and after a while it should learn, that for you: German - probably unwanted, Cyrillic - probably unwanted etc. Unfortunately you don't get to see under the hood/bonnet to understand what is actually going on. I recommend that you stick with manually notifying spam for a while and see if that works - you need a lot of samples. If Goog allows you mark ham then use that too but I suspect they implicitly mark a mail as ham if you don't mark it as spam. When I say a lot of samples, I think you need at least 200 ham and 200 spam samples minimum, ideally 500 each and the more the better. Moving to another mass mail supplier will almost certainly not help.