View From the Bushes

At my work we're struggling with the problem of spam. I think in reality pretty much everyone with an e-mail account struggles with spam, because there really isn't an easy solution, especially if people are going to freak out over a couple of false positives. The story starts with the purchase of a spamfilter. After testing it out for a while and getting the rules fairly refined, we turned it on. And nine days later the world ended, or that's at least what people acted like.

As I alluded to above, the single biggest problem with any kind of spam-solution is false positives. It's impossible to be certain that somewhere in the fetid pile of thousands of e-mail ads for Viagra and penis enlargement that there isn't a solitary e-mail in there somewhere which is actually from someone legitimate. Now our false positive rate was less that a quarter of a percent, and most of the false positives were from mailing lists where are easily added to a white list so that there's no further problem.

But suddenly, the idea that legitimate e-mail might be getting blocked turned into thousands of phantom messages which people were sure were being blocked. Even now, after turning of the spamfilter due to the enormous uproar, people are still convinced that they are missing dozens of e-mail. So now we are considering writing some horribly complicated software to allow people to view the subjects and decide for themselves. Which is fine, except that's essentially what people are already doing, and spending 50 man-hours implementing a program which allows people to do what they are already doing seems silly, but maybe I'm not seeing the big picture.

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Ross