On May 31, 2019, at 11:57 AM, Bill Rising <[email protected]> wrote: > Ever since I told Beth that I used iCloud for most all of my email, and that > it worked pretty well, I stopped getting any email from the usergroup.
I often get reports of weird things happening with mail to this group, and I’m sure this group is not unique in that regard. When I can, I check the problem emails pretty closely and I can rarely find anything wrong with them. (Ask Harry about this! His email to this group seems to go crazy every couple of months for no reason we can discover.) > Wouldn't you know, Apple's mail servers had suddenly decided that anything > coming from the group was spam, so I just found a ton of usergroup emails > today when looking to see if a different missing email had ended up in the > Junk folder. > So... the fact that iCloud's mail server sometimes has trouble deciding what > is Junk and what is not Junk is something which has been around since I've > used iCloud. The mysterious part is that emails from what should be safe > sources (because I've gotten many and never marked them as Junk) suddenly and > unpredictably become classified with Junk. I suppose this is common to mail > servers, as it sometimes happens at work, too. It just seems waaaay more > common with iCloud. Modern junk mail filters for the major mail sites use mysterious algorithms to grab unwanted mail. Until a few years ago the most advanced techniques used Bayesian filtering. I’ve read that Google and likely Apple are using AI algorithms and maybe even deep learning to catch spam. Probably even the people who wrote the algorithms don’t really understand the spam/no-spam triggers their machines have taught themselves. > The worst part is that I have a sneaking suspicion that there are messages > which never even make it to the Junk folder. I cannot possibly have evidence > for this, just as I could not ever have evidence that there is an invisible, > massless, floating ghost in my garage, but I still am suspicious. (Well, not > of the ghost.) > > Dunno if others have a strategy for making the Junk filtering less > capricious.... There are several suggestions for the problem of spam. Here are two I think might work: (1) The mail programs should flag email without a valid digital signature. People are against this on privacy grounds. It would also require people to get registered public keys. (I digitally sign all my email.) (2) Put a charge of 0.01 cent on every email sent. This is small enough not to discourage most email, but is enough to mean real money for the spammers who send millions of emails. The criticism of this is that it’s technically difficult. Think of it as an almost-free postage stamp. The money could be used to enhance the Web’s infrastructure. Ultimately, I think the spam problem could be the death of email. Spamming on USENET essentially killed it about ten years ago. L^2 PS/ I emptied my mail Junk folder late yesterday afternoon and it already shows 407 emails flagged as junk across the five accounts I’m using. Errr… three more as I was writing this sentence. ---- Lee Larson [email protected] I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical. — Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the Future, 1982
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