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Aggressive Email Filtering Blocks Political Debate
Stephen writes "Many of us have spam blockers operating on our mail. But according to this BBC article, when British members of parliament starting having their emails filtered last month, it stopped them talking about genuine political business such as the Sexual Offences Bill, and prevented them receiving some constituents' emails." This problem has bit me on the bum a few times too. About 1 message in every 250 spam is a false hit. Course thats about once a day :(
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Perhaps they should start using pgp encrypted/signed stuff and filter out all non-encrypted/signed emails?
*shrug* That's what I do.. I hate getting email from somebody I don't know...
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
Kind of - I also find I end up reading, or at least checking, all teh stuff my mail app sends to the spam folder - and I guess I get one false positivie every 200 or so spams. However I find it much quicker browsing the spam in the spam folder, knowing it's probably spam than trying to weed out the spam in my inbox.
So, the filtering perfomed by my mail app does save me some time but not as much as it could if the filtering were perfect.
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
create a text file [&] zip it
Unless the recipient is expecting this they should just delete the message. I routinely delete any email that has zipped attachments unless I have previously agreed with the sender to send it that way. (That's assuming the recipients mailserver doesn't routinely strip zip files off as an enterprise virus protection measure in the first place.)
But one way your suggestion could be modified that will work for anyone whose email can view HTML is to print your message to graphic file, convert it to a GIF and embed it into a simple a webpage.
The reader will open the file and see what looks like a text message, but it actually will be the GIF image of your message.
Most filters don't block HTML and GIF files.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
i got in a fight with an ex-girlfriend and we ceased speaking for awhile
;-(
i became further incensed because she never contacted me after the fight
we didn't talk for 2 months
finally, i contacted her and said "why didn't you get back to me??!!"
she said, "you didn't get my email?"
i looked, and there it was, 2 months back, in my spam folder (yes, i keep all of my spam, the folder is gigantic)
although you could make a joke about emails from girlfriends being called spam, in this particular case, considering the chance at reconciliation that was lost and the feelings involved, it was definitely not funny at all
so i can say, with certainty, that my personal life has been greatly and adversely affected by spam.
you can hate spam for all sorts of reasons, but for me, it's personal.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If this were to hapen in the US, they would say "spam isn't really an issue these days" and no spam laws...
Boy would that be bad. Slow progress, is better than "no problem at all".
Lets push for a "no spam filter for Congress until Congress passes a no-spam law"
Then again, wouldn't be needed if enforced.
A better solution (the one I use) includes a summary report of spam filtered each day. The report lists the number of spams from each sender and I can usually spot valid mail in the list of "From"s without having to look at a single message.
If I spot a false positive, then I dig into my spam archive for that day and check it out.
I use the spastic filter:
http://spastic.sourceforge.net
Currently the way it stands in the UK the British electorate has a legal right to contact their local MPs, there would be uproar if Tony Blair even suggested that this could be done. Which is a good thing, people don't trust politians as it is, without making them even more accountable. As for how well it works in the US, I would disagree it just means that bodies with the most money have a disproportional say in how the country works. In any case some of the problems with the filtering seems to have been with internal emails as well as external ones.
bayesian filtering works. i've gone 3 months (after about a month of training) with 0 false positives at about 120 spams per day. i'm down to about 1 false negative per month as well. training is conveniently done by adding keybindings to mutt. when i get a false negative in my inbox, i hit a key and bogofilter learns that it's spam. another key corrects false positives. training is fun, too. i couldn't be happier with this setup.
I hate to do this because it's only partially complete. But I have a concept worked out on how to handle spam that works extremely well and removes the chance of false positives, especially from Real People.
It's not a money-making scheme, but it is prior-art <grin>.
The idea is a hybridization of SpamAssassin and tmda (tagged message delivery agent) wherein you accept all email into your inbox and the spam goes into a spam mailbox. Nothing New...
The cool part comes in when you start automating the spam_mail similar, at least conceptually, to what I have on my website. Shameless plug here
The idea is that you send out an email confirmation, similar to tmda, for only that email which is considered spam (by SpamAssassin). This means that most of your regular communications would go unhindered. But it would also make casual contact via email the easy and simple function that it is supposed to be.
These notions of having an email list of only your known contacts is a pain in the arse and most times met with extreme hostility. This is especially true if you are attempting to contact someone privately from an email list, or from a solitication from their website.
I have to warn you that if you use the code as described on my website you will probably break your server in the first day. I've rewritten it to scale much better (1,000 spams every 10 minutes). But I haven't had the chance to post the new code. But conceptually it rocks!
I've processed something like 20,000 emails without taking a single false positive, unless the original sender vegged... but then he didn't really want to talk to me anyways now did he?
The point is, it places the responsibility of delivering spammy mail to the sender. I do not have to receive it. However it allows the non-spammer to go about the internet unhindered.
Regular mail is anything SpamAssassin rates less than 5, I get a few false negatives- no real biggy.
Spam Low is anything SpamAssassin rates less than 8.
Spam High is anything SpamAssassin rates 8 or more.
My ratio of Spam High to Spam Low is 30:1. I easily scan my Spam Low in seconds. I glance at my Spam High only for entertainment before trashing it.
The false positives that end up in Spam Low are usally mailing lists that I have not white listed. When I spot one, I adjust my white list.
I am eagerly awaiting SpamAssassin 2.5 which has Bayes filtering to eliminate the very few false positives I get. As I understand it, this filtering in combination with SpamAssassin means I need to provide no feedback to the filter. Yet, spammers will have a different Bayes filter, therefore they will be unable to adapt their spam to go through my filter.
Net result: SpamAssassin Rocks!
Spam filters stop literally dozens of such interruptions every day, and I can review the list of blocked spam in less than a minute, once a day.
I also send copies of my email to my cell phone, so the spam filter means that I get fewer distractions while I'm away from work, and spend less time deleting mail from the phone (which is more cumbersome than on the computer).
From the article:
We receive over half a million incoming e-mails a month - so far the filter has blocked about 900 a week, which is about 1 in 180, much less than 1%
If only 1 in 180 messages are classed as spam, why are they using the filter in the first place? If the average amount of spam received across the board is less than 1%, then those MPs who complained of being inundated with spam must be few in number.
Why should the whole system suffer because of those MPs? They should implement their own filters if they have a problem.
The helpdesk has only received a handful of unblocking requests.
Not surprising. How are people supposed to know they're missing out on important e-mail messages if they never receive them because of the filter?
Incidentally, my ISP uses a spam filter which is completely transparent to the user. Any messages that get filtered, legitimate or otherwise, I never even know about. Most users don't even know the filter is in place. I'll be leaving them when my contract is up, being sure to first check up on the practices of any new ISP I choose.
...is that the MPs aren't filtering their e-mail, it's under the centralised control of Parliament's IT Services Dept.
Consequently, MPs are not receiving mail about e.g. the Sexual Offences Bill silently. They can't periodically check their "junk mail" folder for false positives, they have to know (via out-of-band communication) that they've had a false positive block and then go cap-in-hand to the IT Dept to ask for the mail to be released. Anything that gets caught that they don't know about, well, they won't know about.
This is why all spam filtering should be within the control of the user.
How it works:
... and then there were none