[Previous entry: "Not true, not really..."] [Next entry: "The Spokane Pedophile Club"]

05/25/2005: "another plan for spam"

In August of 2002, Paul Graham published his now-famous, Plan for Spam that introduced Baysian filtering to the anti-spam crowd. These days its assumed that your mail program and potentially your ISP are running some kind of Baysian filter. With time, the spammers have found a way around the Baysian filters, and we are again dealing with a crushing load of spam in our mailboxes.

My friend Jef has published his recipie for building an anti-spam system.


In November 2004, Microsoft's second-in-command Steve Ballmer made some headlines by mentioning that Chairman Bill Gates was getting four million spams per day. At the time, I was dealing with a little spam problem of my own - I was getting around a million spams per day. I found it a little comforting that my problem wasn't quite as bad as Bill's. However, a couple of weeks later Ballmer corrected himself, saying he mis-remembered the stat and Gates actually gets four million per year.

This means I was getting one hundred times as much spam as Bill Gates.

Nevertheless, after filtering we both get about the same amount: around ten spams per day in our inboxes. Ballmer says that Microsoft has an entire department dedicated to protecting their mailboxes from spam. At ACME Labs there's just one guy, one server, and a T1 line. And yet my filters are a hundred times as effective as Microsoft's. How do I do it?