Slashdot Mirror
Has Microsoft 'Solved' Spam?
MsWillow writes to tell us the Seattle PI is running a story looking back at Bill Gates promise to have the spam problem "solved" in two years. Well, it looks like time is up, and the verdict is -- an emphatic "maybe". From the article: "Microsoft says it sees things differently. To "solve" the problem for consumers in the short run doesn't require eliminating spam entirely, said Ryan Hamlin, the general manager who oversees the company's anti-spam programs. Rather, he said, the idea is to contain it to the point that its impact on in-boxes is minor. In that way, Hamlin said, Gates' prediction has come true for people using the right tactics and advanced filtering technology."
I scoff at Bill Gates' "efforts" to reduce spam. What has he done precisely?
Probably just deferred the responsibility to one of his underlings. Aside from that, he talks about crazy methods such as deciding how much money the sender has to pay you before you open the e-mail.
Gates has plenty of articles which detail how much he hates spam. Anyone can sit down and write this, but Gates gets the high exposure interviews with the Wall Street Journal and the AP.
Gates is all talk. If you want to read some articles from some very interesting people, check out A Plan for Spam by Paul Graham. It talks about simple ways to write Bayesian spam filters and does a very good job at describing how they work. Another valuable member of the anti-spam community is Jonathon Zdziarski who has written many books about how to actually get rid of spam. You can also read the Slashdot interview with him.
My work here is dung.
You're a computer engineer and you don't know about the "In-Reply-To" smtp header?
I don't know whether I'm being Informative or Flamebait here...
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
How would you know that an email is a reply?
Using the In-Reply-To: header flag, perhaps? It uses the unique Message-Id. That's how threading works (in good MUAs - Thunderbird has it's own very very strange message threading). Save the message-id for outgoing e-mails, for each user. When a message is received, match the In-Reply-To header against the list of Message-Ids. If it's there, whitelist.
Easy.
:wq!