The 7 Worst Tech Predictions of All Time

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6 points·tsally··6 comments

Bill Gates, 2004 "Two years from now, spam will be solved."

This came true. The problem was that email inboxes were inundated with spam, but now free spam filters are good enough to filter almost all spam with extremely few false negatives. (e.g. gmail) Who cares what volume of email traffic is spam?

That does not match my experience.

POPFile on my local machine lets more spam through than I'd like, and has a noticeable level of false positives. Same with the bundled spam filters on my mail accounts at Pair and Fastmail. Whatever we're using at work -- some free filter -- is pretty bad too.

I hear good things about Gmail's filter, but it's not quite free. You have to let Google's computers read your mail, store your mail, and show you ads. I use Gmail occasionally, but checking now, there are still a few pieces of spam on the first page of conversations. (I don't see any false positives among the hundreds of messages in the spam folder, but as I don't receive any diverse/important mail there, that's not surprising.)

Are there any other spam filters you recommend?

gmail is great, but I get many false negatives. Anytime I sign up for a new website the email confirmation email goes to my spam box.

Isn't email confirmation classed as spam a false positive, not a false negative? Or do I misunderstand?

you are correct. I posted this far too many hours after I should have gone to bed.

My point is the same. For a spam filter to be effective it should not penalize you for email you get from a new source that you truly do want.

Ken Olsen can be a two-fer with "Unix is snake oil". Supposedly, he claims he was misquoted...

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