More Fun with False Positives

I was just reading an article about an unfortunate effort to deploy an anti-spam appliance at a mortgage company.

The appliance certainly eliminated the junk email, but it also eliminated nearly all electronic business inquiries. When a filter deletes an email that was in reality legitimate, it's known as a "false-positive." About one-third of all junk messages are finance related. The creators of the network appliance knew this, and incorporated keywords like "refinance" and "no money down" into the filter. SpamButcher and nearly all other email filtering software have similar filter data-points.

We try not to give away a large number of specifics about how the filter works, but there are definitely some people who should expect a larger than average number of wanted emails to be intercepted.

These people should consider an alternate approach to dealing with junk spam email, or at least make sure they've "whitelisted" email addresses and phrases that could cause problems.

One example would be people who regularly communicate with countries that originate a larger than normal amount of spam. Other examples include anyone who deals with emails involving finance, pharmaceuticals or adult content.

Another option is to have someone perform "human filtering" on all messages filtered into the junk folder in order to make sure nothing wanted was missed. Rumor has it that Bill Gates has several people employed for just this purpose.

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