Flow My Thoughts, The IT Professor Said

Spam, Spam, Spam - Canned!

http://home.dataparty.no/kristian/reviews/bayesian/

Spam! 'Nuff said. As mentioned earlier in this blog, a promising solution to this problem, which is worse than dandruff but not quite as bad as Ebola fever, is Bayesian filters. The article reviews a couple of e-mail products which incorporate such filters, and concludes they are reasonably effective at controlling spam.

The only question being, in my mind, whether the annoyance of spam is sufficient to make all users go to the trouble of "training" their new tool. If a sufficient critical mass does not adopt such a tool, much of its potential benefit for eliminating spam is negated; we must remember that the overload problem is perhaps more troubling than individual inconvenience caused by spam.

Put another way: we don't want a product which just shields a user from spam while allowing it to pollute on the InterNet commons, we want something which will exterminate it root and branch.