November 12, 2003
The Most Effective Spam Filter: Me
The Cafe Scientifique on Spam was Monday night. Listening to a group of highly-charged anti-spam advocates toss around complex social, technical and legal spam solutions, made me wonder why we're throwing our best minds at a problem that essentially boils down to a Wal-Mart flyer.
Why is unsolicited email so troubling that we devote thousands of man-hours to its eradication and management? All this talk about configuring spam filters, debating the merits of Baysian filtering or charging people to send email. We're throwing too much money and talent at creating an artifical solution that isn't nearly as effective as the elegant tool that nature gave us -- a brain.
My brain will always be a better spam filter than a machine.
Every day I go to my mailbox -- the real one on my front porch -- and remove the mail. There's always a huge pile (because I'm a magazine junkie, but that's fodder for another post). The relevant stuff (bills, magazines, personal correspondence, birthday cards with cash) are all mixed in with the junk mail (flyers, coupons, credit card offers). If we approached our physical mailboxes
in the same way we approach our email inboxes, we would stand there every afternoon and grumble, "It takes too much time to filter the good from the bad. I get offended looking at these ads. I can't tell the two kinds of mail apart. Someone make a machine to do it for me!" Sheesh, somebody call the wah-mbulance.
In less than a second, you make the call between relevant and irrelevant mail. Is it really so much more difficult to make that decision online? I would argue that paper spam is worse than electronic spam. That crap weighs down my garbage can and takes up space in my home while electronic spam is vaporized instantly.
Ray Ozzie says, "As time goes on, though, you'll only visit eMail as a low-priority background task, much as you do when sorting through your physical mail at home." I'm with him here. Sort with your own eyes. But then goes on to say, "You'd never do important work through your home mailbox, would you?" That's where we diverge. Some of the most critical "work" I do as a citizen and co-head of household is done through my mailbox. Ever get an electric bill? A credit card bill? A water bill? They come in the same pile as this mass of ads and solicitations. A false negative in that pile could cost me a late charge or a ding on my credit rating. The consequences are much more dire than missing an email from a coworker. So why don't we demand that Congress legislate an anti-junk mail bill? Because eyeball filtering works.
So what cues give away paper spam?
- It's unexpected. My credit card bill comes once a month and anything extraneous from that sender is suspect. It's an easy way to tell a Visa offer from a Visa bill.
- It's generic. Spam without a salutation might as well be addressed to "Resident".
- Trigger keywords. Antispam crusaders spend a lot of time on this one, but there are two big problems with keyword filtering. 1) It catches too little: You'll never catch all keywords and their unique variations without adding filtering rules each time the keywords change. But the human brain is very good at recognizing V1C0DIN as Vicodin. Chris Pirillo laments, in his essay on the death of email, "Worse yet, my wife is getting e-mails that promise to increase the size of a part of her body that she doesn't have." Doesn't that make it really easy for her to quickly determine that those messages are irrelevant?
2) It catches too much: Filter the word "prescription" and watch what happens when Dave sends me a note to pick up his insulin from his phone instead of his normal (whitelisted) email client? I miss it in my spambox and he goes into a coma. Not so good.
- Unrecognized/suspect sender. I received an envelope with Christopher Reeve's return address last week. But I wasn't fooled into thinking that Christopher Reeve had any personal business with me. If you can't tell that anna1615zyyox@mailmox.com is a suspect sender, then you don't need a spam filter, you need a helmet.
If for no other reason, you should filter spam with your eyeballs because God says so. Let me quote Generations 6:13. "And God said, 'Let there be human brains capable of setting the time on a VCR and judging the safe distance from the car in front of you and deciding what is relevant and what is spam.'" Amen.