Yet another reason to despise Microsoft

[lovingboth]

You may know that Outlook 2003 - MS's email etc client - has, at last, a spam filter system. Using 'state-of-the-art technology' too, natch.

Someone's analysed how it works. And guess what? Not only is it crap, as in really really crap...

(You know all those 'PEN1S' enlarging systems and 'C*H*E*A*P***V*I*A*G*R*A'? They're considered less likely to be spam, because the subject is all in capitals. Plus 'pen1s' is unlikely to be in the filter's fixed and untrainable list of words, unlike - I kid you not - 'riilldijgjgjg' and the second one has lots of non-alphanumeric characters.)

...but if it detects the word 'linux' in the text of the email, it considers it's more likely to be spam than if it does not.

Comments

Well...

[kingginger.livejournal.com]

... it does alright, and it does learn bit by bit... Better than nothing at all....

*shrugs*

Still, like the software, but it is very crap...

I read somewhere pre-release that the Spam definitions were supposed to be updateable...

But I haven't seen / heard anything on this...

Re: Well...

[mattp.livejournal.com]

Better than nothing at all
Actually, in the case of spam, a false positive match for spam is very muh NOT better than nothing at all, or even a false negative for that matter.

Re: Well...

[kingginger.livejournal.com]

Well - I've never had a false positive yet (after the initial training period of adding mailing lists etc etc) - *shrugs*

Maybe one day they will get rid of spam, and while they are at it, get rid of spyware too!!

Re: Well...

[lovingboth]

it does learn bit by bit

According to my pet Microsoft expert, only via service packs which update the database.

Did you see the Verity Stob on visiting the spammer's office, complete with the worker who falls asleep on the keyboard resulting in words like 'riilldijgjgjg'?

[jensolo.livejournal.com]

I recently downgraded my Hotmail account from a paid account back to a free one. Miraculously the amount of junk mail I was receiving decreased to an amount that would not overload my Inbox, but while I had more storage space, the amount of junk mail I received curiously increased fourfold. I signed up for Hotmail about 2 years before they were bought by Microsoft, and I didn't switch to someone else because it was my primary business email at the time. I dislike Microsoft quite a bit, but I'm just too lazy to switch now, 9 years later, even though the business has folded. But I was quite annoyed when I realised what was going on with the junk mail: I paid for the priviledge of wasting time wading thru crap for more than 2 years. Never again!