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Comment: Refine your definition of spam (Score 2) 265  by
christopherfinke (#48133021) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why
Can't Google Block Spam In Gmail?  Some of it is UCE, partially
due to a couple dingbats with similar names who apparently think
my gmail account belongs to them.  This isn't spam; at worst,
it's bacn with a case of mistaken identity.  As someone whose
full-time job is preventing spam (I work on Akismet, which
checks about 380MM Web comments per day for spam), my general
response to these kinds of questions is this: Fighting spam is
hard because what's spam for you is not always spam for someone
else, and spammers are continually changing tactics -- what
worked to prevent spam yesterday may not work as well tomorrow,
so it's a constantly moving target.  In my experience, GMail's
filter is just ok. I see about 50 spam per day end up in my spam
folder, 3 or 4 that make it to my inbox, and maybe one false
positive per month (when I bothe