[Edited and Changed] My junkmail gets full with many true junkmails, but occasionally has an important mail lost in it, or a joke someone forwarded, and which I AM willing to read. But the only option I have today is to look at my whole 450 emails junkmail folder, waste my time, and possibly be distracted or disturbed by the material I'm reading.
The solution: a spam mail organizer with three categories: DEFINITE spam, PROBABLY spam, Maybe spam.
The definite is known to be spam. It will be deleted. If I ever wish to see this spam (some people want to occasionally see some junkmail entries) you can on a dedicated website. It doesn't take up too much storage, because these spams are always copies of each other, with slight differences. You would be able to read the history of the spam, and a follow up and discussion on the spam itself. ie whether it is a hoax, a source for viruses, or just an aggravating way of advertising.
PROBABLY spam and Maybe spam, are sorted by priority, category etc.
You can mark the mails with any of: "todo check this, not sure, confirmed spam, unhadled". And of course you can delete the mail or set rules to do with various types of categories.-- pashute, May 20 2008 Honestly, what's the point? Why do you care why the spam filter thinks an e-mail is spam, unless you're a spammer wanting to defeat it?
(The filter we use (Cloudmark) relies not just on Bayesian Filtering, but on feedback offered by all its customers. Some spam gets through, but I can provide feedback to the system by moving the spam to a "Flagged as spam" folder in my mail client. On the rare occasion something legitimate ends up in my spam folder, my removing it from the spam folder is also considered feedback to the system. I don't need to know why something is considered spam, I just need to know if it is considered spam I can rely on that assessment.)-- phoenix, May 20 2008 I don't like this idea. I deal with anti-spam on an ISP mail server every day, and I don't like this idea. It's needlessly complex, will lead to headaches for the user, and will never work quite the way you suspect.
And the main reason I don't like this idea is this statement:
"It also gives you possible NON-SPAM suspects, and the reason the program may think its not spam."
If something is possible NON-SPAM, why are you going to be holding it from the user. "Possible non-spam" sounds an awful lot like "ham". Are you suggesting that you'll treat all mail as spam, until it proves otherwise? A system based solely on false positives?
But, I'm going to bun it anyway. The reason I'm going to bun it is that in my years of experience I've learned that there is a class of user who wants to examine every tiny little detail of everything. Every spam message, they want to read, they want it blocked, but they want to know how and why. The same user that nit-picks over a few kilobits of connection speed, the guy that calls every time his firewall blinks, the woman who freaks over her anti-virus telling her it found and repaired something.
For giving these twits one more thing they can read, look at, and not understand, this bun's for you. /rant.-- Noexit, May 20 2008 I'm editing the entry, and changing it to the following simpler saying: My junkmail gets full with many true junkmails, but occasionally has an important mail lost in it, or a joke someone forwarded, and which I AM willing to read. But the only option I have today is to look at my whole 450 emails junkmail folder, waste my time, and possibly be distracted or disturbed by the material I'm reading.
The solution: a spam mail organizer with three categories: DEFINITE spam, PROBABLY spam, Maybe spam. The definite is known to be spam. It will be deleted. If I ever wish to see this spam (some people want to occasionally see some junkmail entries) you can on a dedicated website. PROBABLY spam and Maybe spam, are sorted by priority, category etc.-- pashute, May 21 2008 This was the original: This program should work ALONGSIDE the spam control, and should be a mail-program add-on or webmail program feature.
You want to be sure that nothing important is in your junkmail. So its devided into three: a. Sure spam - consolidated, and can be seen on the program's website www.spamgaze.com if you really want to, together with user rating etc. All known spams are in this category, and no need to save them in junkmail, except for some info on the sender, addressing info, and if there was anything unique in the spam (like a fw:fw:fw:fw list). b. Probably spam: devided into subcategories according to which this spam was decided. c. Suspected as spam: Here too the reasons can be used as keywords showing why it is suspect.
When you enter the program, it just says what the condition of your junkmail is, and shows you the categories of spam in your junkbox. It also gives you possible NON-SPAM suspects, and the reason the program may think its not spam.
You can a. view the consolidated mail if you really wish to waste your time by going to the spamgaze.com. Even their you can look at the mail under categories (keywords): Jokes, Sales, Pornography etc, so that you decide whats important and relevant.
b. You can look at the 2nd and 3rd lists, sorted by types. You can choose to see mailer names and email titles according to the categories (the list can be in a tree UI, so you press the + sign and it opens)-- pashute, May 21 2008 [Phoenix] but to find the mistaken junk, you gotta read the whole list! Most of which is reliable, so you don't want to bother reading it. Catch 22. So you just rely on the spam filters and loose your legit mail. Or waste your time reading the 98% spam.-- pashute, May 21 2008 I like the idea, but I think it would have been baked if the software was smart enough to make it work.-- bneal27, May 21 2008 No, false positives are so rare (maybe 10 in 3 years) that they're negligible.
If someone calls and asks if I received their e-mail and I haven't, I can look in my spam folder for it - specifically, I can look for the sender's name so there's no need to parse all the messages. Moving the e-mail out of the spam folder trains the software to treat that e-mail less like spam. If e-mails from that sender keep getting flagged as spam, I can whitelist the address.
My company gets about 4,500 e-mails a day. 3,500-4,000 of those are spam. Of all the spam, about 20 messages make it to my mailbox. Moving those 20 e-mails to my spam folder trains the system to treat those more like spam. They're an inconvenience, but nowhere near having to deal with the hundreds I'd have if I didn't have a spam filter.
For what it's worth, there are plenty of companies that will act as a front-end for your mail server, filtering out spam for you. In a method much as you describe, they let you view messages they've culled in case they snagged something legitimate.-- phoenix, May 21 2008 So your saying you dont look at your junk folder unless someone calls you up. As opposed to you, I have found several times that it WAS worth looking through the junk folder, deleting my way through it, but it took too much time, and was sometimes disturbing or distracting. I know of several friends who adhere to your strategy, but many who are more like me, and do want the good feeling of (as Gmail puts it:) "Hooray! No more spam!"-- pashute, May 21 2008 Hey, more power to you. I'm just saying that if you don't trust your spam filter you should get a new one.-- phoenix, May 21 2008 But I do trust the spam filter! Why shouldn't I be albe to see how "sure" the filter is about my spam? I think its a useful halfbea which would be adopted by many. A site that shows what the current "state of art spams" are, would at least be interesting, and at most be useful. This site, tied in with a spam filter would be better that what you have.
It seems to me everyone against this idea is saying: why not stay with what we have. its working ok. my answer is: if something can be improved, consider the improvement before blowing it away.-- pashute, Jun 28 2008 edited 2009-- pashute, Sep 30 2009 random, halfbakery