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Paul Graham on Fighting Spam

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the near-and-dear-to-my-heart dept.

Ramakrishnan M writes "Paul Graham, the Lisp Guru is back with a great technique to fight spam. It is based on trust matric, and he claims, only 5 out of 1000 spams got leaked out of this system with 0 false positives. Worth looking at."

1 of 675 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yeah but.... by plover · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    RTROTFA (Read The Rest Of The F'ing Article)

    Your filters are trained BY YOU to blacklist or whitelist words based on whether or not YOU decide if the message is spam. So if you mark Tcl-type messages as non-spam, then you'll get them.

    It sounds about halfway to the "user agent" concept that all the futurists say will be the Next Big Thing. Think about applying the same filtering characteristics to reading articles from a mailing list, or your perusing of Slashdot. If you never read "YRO" articles and always read "spam" articles, this could be the mechanism your agent would use to float the anti-spam articles to the top of your screen, or the head of your inbasket.

    Anyway, my point was they're YOUR filters, YOUR reading habits decide what's spam and what's not. And if you don't trust it, don't install it. You can spend all day reading all about organ-lengthening treatments, it's no skin off my nose (no pun intended.)

    --
    John