131–140 of 286 posts
I use a Bayesian filter trained on old spam (I haven’t retrained it in years) combined with Spamhaus blocklists. My guess is that spammers found a clever way to fool the Bayesian filter, or they found new hosts to send email from in order to bypass blacklists.
Yes. I suddenly just started getting tons and tons of German spam. I tried Googling for a way to block mail in a language or from a country, but apparently the technology just isn't there to do so(/s). Getting rid of Russian and German mail would completely fix my spam problem.
Nah they'd have to develop a whole system that can automatically detect a text's language. For example, to recognize what language to translate to/from without having to be manually selected. We're out of luck until then.
It does not care whether it is in German or Cyrillic, it will learn the characteristics gradually. It does require effort.
If you teach a bayesian classifier with around 500 ham and 500 spam, you will see very little spam and if you continue to teach it, it gets better and better. I am assuming that is what Google give you but if I was them, that's what I'd do. I'd also add a few lists and stuff but the gold standard is a trained bayesian filter. You get to do the training, there is no shortcut. I suspect that if you don't mark a mail as spam then it will be implicitly marked as ham.
Getting an efficient spammy feedback mechanism working in a mail system is surprisingly hard. Email changes at each hop as it gets from source MUA via MTAs to the destination MUA. Headers are added at a minimum at each hop. Anyway, that's my problem - not yours!
So, no they do not need to run up a language detector but given that Google have an online translation service, I doubt that would be tricky. That sort of thing may be added to an "enterprise" offering.
Try teaching your mailbox what you want and don't want and see if the clever buggers at Google have actually mastered the basics. They probably have but you need to do the work to provide the data that corresponds to showing what you want.
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Nowadays? Try day one. I always thought of this as a misfeature and disabled it from the start. I have no idea how this would be useful to me.
For me, it's been the single greatest boost to email productivity. It works great 99%+ of the time for me where I only keep any eye on Updates and Primary, and maybe once a week clear out the Promotions tab. Forums and Social I can usually clear out without even looking. Interesting how people can have such different experiences.
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I carefully look for “subscribe to news” checkboxes and always untick them; if you send me campaign emails without me explicitly opting in you are getting a spam flag, whether or not I gave you an address for transactional mail.
Not sure if you meant political campaign emails specifically or marketing campaign emails in general. The former are some of the absolute worst offenders in that regard, for sure. I try to use unsubscribe links when 1) they exist and 2) the email is from a legit organization that I reasonably believe is actually going to unsubscribe me from something (if not from every place they've copied my address to by now), but…
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For me, it's been the single greatest boost to email productivity. It works great 99%+ of the time for me where I only keep any eye on Updates and Primary, and maybe once a week clear out the Promotions tab. Forums and Social I can usually clear out without even looking. Interesting how people can have such different experiences.
I, for one, don't use that feature because I use two email addresses. People who know me personally only know one of them, and I use the other for registrations and subscriptions.
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Hmm so this is indeed a thing. I operate some email servers and often get spam notifications from, say, Hotmail, and the emails are always legitimate. It's like some people don't bother unsubscribing from lists, they just start reporting it as spam hoping it will go away.
> It's like some people don't bother unsubscribing from lists, they just start reporting it as spam hoping it will go away. I do that all the time. I consider every list I didn't explicitly and intentionally subscribe to as spam and treat them accordingly. I wish I wouldn't have to do that but I find subscribing someone to a list when they thought they were just buying or creating an account for a product so unnervin…
My personal account is pretty clean and rarely does anything get through that shouldn't. Occasionally I find something in the spam filter that shouldn't be there, usually password resets.
My work account is seeing a big increase in "professional" spam. "Hey Guy, did you see my last email I sent . . .", "Hey Guy, we are the top network security consultants . . ." Many of them are getting tagged Important. Some of them are so left field it doesn't make any sense that they are listed as important. Here's a good one:
"You asked for it, and we made it. We are delighted to present a complete redesign of our Merge Rules in Duplicate Check." - coming from mta.exacttarget.com
How is that not spam and how did it get tagged important? I have no idea who this company is. I've never done business or corresponded with them.
As I write this I'm coming to the realization that I'm a mechanical turk working for Google to find and report.
What's interesting is that many of the emails are coming from clear email marketing sources like HubSpot and Exact Target. Why would those get bumped up? I also notice some coming from something like xxxx.outbound.protection.outlook.com - not sure what that is exactly, but it mostly comes from companies directly marketing using their spf and dkim domain, but seems to passing through outlook.com.
Email is dying but will never be dead.