Hacker News Reader

Comment by krupan | Hacker News Reader

Email spam has not been a problem since we figured out Bayesian filtering. I understand why Twitter and Facebook don't offer that as a tool to it's users, because we'd all filter out the advertising that they live off of. Why couldn't Mastedon offer it? Will Wheaton opens a Mastodon account, messages he doesn't want to see start flooding in, he clicks "this is spam" on each one, and after a day or two he no longer sees the messages he doesn't want to see. The trolls, starved of attention, move on. Am I missing something?

View on HN

> Email spam has not been a problem since we figured out Bayesian filtering.

My understanding is, this is not because Bayesian filtering solved the spam problem forever. It's because Bayesian filtering solved the spam problem for long enough for Gmail to dominate email.

Google had a ton of data and they were already using it to recommend ads, so they were well-positioned to use it to make the best spam filter. Unlike the things that came before, you could rely on Gmail's filtering. You didn't have to sort your spam folder ever. This was a clear advantage bringing even more people to Gmail.

Now the thing discouraging email spammers isn't any given filter, it's the fact that Google owns email and the cost of messing with Google is too high.

(I am not saying that this, in particular, makes Google evil. Another way to look at it is, Google saved email as a usable medium, by centralizing it.)

I rely on Thunderbird's filtering and it catches almost all spam mails that I get.

I have my own domain, and can therefore generate as much email addresses as I want.

In fact, I use a separate (non existing) email address for every individual or business I communicate with, and their mails all end up on my administrator account.

When I receive spam, I can easily recognize who sold my email address, and bann them forever.

That's very effective.

How do you handle people who've had their systems hacked and address books stolen though? Is it just a blanket FU?

One way to see this could be that anyone getting hacked without disclosing it properly (intentionally or due to not having realized it) is arguably worse than those selling off personal information, so good riddance.

In the other case, just create a new address.

> Unlike the things that came before, you could rely on Gmail's filtering. You didn't have to sort your spam folder ever.

Was this ever true? It's certainly not true now. Gmail correctly filters almost all spam I receive. And, it also incorrectly filters a healthy amount of legitimate mail, so you still have to check your spam folder. It will even filter mail from Google.

I check my spam folder out of curiosity once in a while, and there is nothing in there I would miss. Like some of it is "legitimate" but it's still just bulk drivel, nothing that obligates me in particular to read it.

Right now, I see mail from Google in my filter. Because it's automated dumb shit where Google Photos wants me to look at my photos from a year ago, and I already told Gmail that was spam, and it believed me.

If I miss an e-mail because it was caught in my spam filter, that's the sender's problem, as opposed to pre-Gmail, when it was my problem.

It seems to me that I haven't _had_ to re-train my spam filter by rescuing important ham messages from the spam folder in a decade. Perhaps your experience is different.

> Perhaps your experience is different.

Very much so. For example, earlier this year I sent email to a company inquiring about an opening. Their response went straight to spam.

I found that running Spamassassin is way more reliable than Google's filter, although it missed some spam from time-to-time I don't think I ever had false positives. Meanwhile I can attest that the few times I tried to use Gmail for receiving something "important" (e.g. an invoice for an online service/shop I just signed up for) it went straight to spam. Maybe because there are so many spam invoices it just can't tell the real ones apart anymore.

Google does not have a very good spam filter, it's pretty average.

In the comment you're replying to, I said that the quality of any particular spam filter used to matter, and doesn't anymore.

In 2006, Google definitely had the best spam filter. Now, instead, it has the harshest consequences to being caught spamming.

Partly I think no one has gotten around to it and partly there are quite a few "free speech at all costs" people in the fediverse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com