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Comment by prodigal_erik | Hacker News Reader

This. I used to think they were clever, but now we know they're such repellent scumbags willing to abuse public resources for private gain that it's actually a black mark against Y Combinator to have been partly responsible and holding dirty money.

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Seriously?

Of course. Email is the main immediate worldwide communication medium that isn't under the arbitrary control of one private owner. Spam is an existential threat to that, which makes it pretty much unforgivable. It's the price of a free society (and here's where I try to remind myself that really is worthwhile) that we can't impose an http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/I/Internet-Death-Penalty.htm..., but if we had some legitimate way to pull the plug on these douches today I surely would.

How is spam an existential threat to email? Spam filters have gotten exceptionally good, to the point where I find it hard to believe that anyone using a decent filter receives enough true spam in their inbox to make them stop using email altogether.

Unseen cost of all that filtering. And for how long is it going to keep up with spammers?

Oh and all the false positives that are a nightmare for so many legit uses.

If you don't think so, please post your email here for us.

Multiple of my email addresses posted online unmasked multiple times, so I certainly get spam. My point is that filters are quite effective.

I still get spam in my inbox regularly. I'm using google postini to do the filtering, in my situation I wouldn't classify it as "quite effective".

Are there better alternatives I am not aware of?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_techniques

I use the default GMail filters - perhaps I'm just lucky and receive easily filtered spam. I get hundreds of spam messages per day, and none break through on the average day.

Hundreds a day sounds plausible. So with that much crap to wade through, how long does it take to finally discover and rescue false positives from the spam folder?

The spam filters today are good not because of magic, but because billions of dollars have been spent securing email.

What a complete and utter waste of resources.

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