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Comment by elaus | Hacker News Reader

AI will not only pass many classical spam filters (Bayesian filters), it will also make it much harder for humans to detect spam (OP's post being a good example).

I never fell for a spam mail so far (i.e. not once clicked a link like OP did), but I fully expect this will change soon. Tough times for people that commonly expect mail from random strangers.

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I would treat it like I do with phone calls/messages - if it comes from a number/address I don’t know it goes into the trash.

I have no need of messages by random strangers

I talked to a relative from nigeria one time for a couple months. He was actually in nigeria, spoke pretty good english, and was scamming to get by and fund his way through college. He said his group was doing ok, and he was living better than most. He sent me pictures of himself, and where he worked, his motorcycle, all sorts of things. Not as a pitch either, like, he was proud of those things and I was interested so he was happy to show and tell about his life, we even exchanged some recipies.

Then one day he just stopped replying, and his email address would bounce. My best guess is it got shut down, for, you know, scamming. Bummed me out though, he was cool, except for the scamming thing.

Bayesian filters? how quaint. you haven't switched to AI filtering yet? Your AI has an advantage over their AI because it has read all your other email and knows what you are actually interested in.

Well it is quite easy. No real humam has been using email anymore in the last 5 years or so.

Even in the workplace it is now common for most people to have a signature saying "only contact me via ms teams".

I am pretty sure that sooner or later the spam will find its way on teams/slack/discord the same way it does on whatsapp but at the very least they are easier to block permanently.

>>No real humam has been using email anymore in the last 5 years or so

Wow, that's some extrapolating from a personal bubble if I've ever seen one. Plenty of workplaces still have email as their default communication method.

There is obviously a little bit of exaggeration but when I open my email at the workplace the bulk of the mails are:

- semi automated reminders (you haven't filled your timesheets!), usually sent by humans but that do not expect answers - internal newsletters - general HR news - special news: electrical issues at the office, stay at home! - spam

Bottom line: none is addressed to you as a particular human, nor require answers.

I am sure it changes for people who have interactions with people outside of the company but I would hate having their job and don't understand why companies haven't adopted XMPP widely to make those kind of interactions. I can theorically receive spam via XMPP, but it requires at the very least that I approve the relationship before hand so if it comes from a domain I don't expect I have no reason to accept that trust.

But on personal side, I haven't received anything from a human for years. People I know usually know my phone number and contact me via instant messaging.

Right, but that's an anecdote - and if we're sharing those my last company that I left very recently everything was an email. If you needed to speak to a lead or a developer from another team you'd email them, even though we had MS teams. You'd maybe ping the person on Teams for a quick thought, but if it was anything more complicated than couple messages you'd send an email. And that was a a big corporation of 40k people.

>>But on personal side, I haven't received anything from a human for years.

I actually have an old friend back from high school and we talk daily using emails. He doesn't use any IM apps so it kinda stuck as our default way of talking.

And of course I exchange emails whenever there's some kind of customer service thing that needs to be dealt with - it's always best to have things in writing.

> And of course I exchange emails whenever there's some kind of customer service thing that needs to be dealt with - it's always best to have things in writing.

I have the feeling contact forms are disappearing everywhere nowadays. Everything is either a chatbot or a chatcall these days.

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