4 ms·

How early? In the 2000s there were plenty of scams. I still remember falling for a banner ad scam "You are the 1000000th customer and you won a prize" sitting

• MrFoof 4y ago
  In the very early 2000s I remember reading A Plan for Spam (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html) and ultimately identifying some Bayesian filtering plugin (I think made by pg et al?) and application I could install on the mail server of the small company (30 people?) I worked for to reliably identify the vast majority of the spam everyone received and keep it out of their inboxes. Even in the very early 2000s, it very easily was dozens of spam messages per legitimate email, and most commercial tools at the time were simple filters, regular expressions and blacklists. Bayesian filtering took us from 5-10% effective to >99% effective overnight.
  • _8j50 4y ago
    Very interesting, haven't even heard of bayesian filtering before and I work with email security on a daily basis.