((There is a cryptic link with the subject of today's post and this picture. All will become clear.))
I pretty much love Microsoft Outlook 2007. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good software, and much more slinky than gmail or any other online mail service I've used.
And one very satisfying feature that I've learned to have a bit of fun with is the customisable spam filtering options. Yes, I'm a geek.
Basically, my email server already has spam filters in place which marks a message as spam based on some complex criteria which I'm not going to go into (for fear of killing both of us).
The result is that when I get a few emails to my inbox, my spam folder gets 20 or 30.
Of course, not all of the messages are spam. The ones that are not are *usually* auto responders from websites I've legitimately signed up for email from.
So I've set up two spam filter procedures that I run manually on all the mail in the Junk folder. One of them looks for specific words in the subject line, the other one looks for words in the subject and body of the email.
Are you still awake? Still with me? WAKE UP!!! Honestly. This is really cool!
The subject line filter includes terms like "iagr" or "ialis" because any email with viagra or cialis (or common misspellings) is 99% likely to be junk mail. And if it's already suspected of being junk for other reasons, this confirms it. Also, things like "diploma" "masters" "degree" are unlikely to be for me.
It's different for Jiggers emails, obviously, as we tend to play lots of grad balls in Scotland, so that kind of language is more prevalent. (of course, you can set "positive" keywords, too, so that anything with "ceilidh band" or "wedding Glasgow" in it does not get processed as spam)
So I basically look through the junk emails every so often, look for commonly recurring terms (that I would otherwise never expect in legitimate emails) and add those terms to the list.
The subject line filter can be more aggressive than the email body filter, but the same principle applies.
What it means is that every week, I test the effectiveness of my filters. It usually deals with about 90% of the spam in the junk mail folder. I've cultivated it over time to be that effective. It's a labour of love.
That means it's much easier to do a visual scan of what's left (it's amazing how they eye can be trained to identify real mail from spam, isn't it?). You might have an email client that effectively reduces all your spam to zero, but think of the fun you're missing out on!
It turns something annoying into a bit of geek-sport fun. Anything to alleviate the tedium.
And if you think that's all the fun to be had with spam email, have a look at Spamusement which takes the subject line of spam emails and conjectures some kind of image that makes sense of it.
Hence, the spam subject line "your dog will love it" creates the above picture. You need to go down the list, read the subject line first, and then see the picture. Thoroughly spamusing.
Recent Comments