Siracusa excerpts continue. http://arstechnica.com/reviews/02q3/macosx-10.2/macosx-10.2-12.html
Apple Mail 1.2's spam filtering system has an interesting, "Tamagotchi-like" interface: ...................................... I'll start with the junk mail filter because it's Mail's most interesting feature. Out of the box, the junk mail filter correctly identifies most spam, but it plays things safe, allowing some spam through rather than falsely identifying legitimate mail as spam. To improve the junk mail filter's accuracy, the user is encouraged to correct its mistakes by manually marking messages as junk or not junk. In response, the junk mail filter learns how to better identify spam, slowly increasing its accuracy over time based on the kind of spam that each user gets. Ignoring the actual success rate of this system, the Tamagotchi-style interaction is strangely appealing. The feeling that you're "teaching the computer", and in the process making your email life a little easier, is a powerful reinforcement for each corrective behavior. "Bad junk mail filter!" "Good junk mail filter!" It's kind of fun. Once you are satisfied with the filter's accuracy, you can set it to "automatic" mode and it will wisk your junk mail away into a dedicated junk mail folder. The three preset modes are "Training" (the default), "Automatic", and "Off." These choices correspond to a set of predefined rules that will be applied to junk mail. Mail continues to "learn" even in "Automatic" mode, and the user can customize the rules without any problems (in which case the junk mail mode is shown as "Custom") Thanks to the appearance of my email address all over the web (and therefore its existence in web caches on Windows computers everywhere) I get a ridiculous amount of spam. Although Mail's junk mail filter correctly identified most of it, it continued to have trouble with a few varieties even after a week of "training." In particular, the various virus emails that consist of only a nonsensical subject line (e.g. "So cool a flash,enjoy it") and an equally nonsensical attachment tend to give the junk mail filter fits. My theory is that those messages do not give the filter much content to go on, so they're hard to use as examples. Equally worrying, perhaps as a result of my training, Mail has started identifying a handful of legitimate email messages as spam--sometimes even messages sent to mailing lists that I subscribe to. I'm not willing to condemn the junk mail filter after only a week of training, especially since I think I receive a heck of a lot more spam than the average user, whose email address isn't plastered all over the net. But I'm still not entirely convinced that it's as good as it could be. On the other hand, other users report great success with the filter. Your mileage may vary. ...................................... ---> jab | commie | http://commie.oy.com "You may have stock options, but could you retire and live off them? If not, you're still in the working class." --- Ken MacLeod
