RE: Hilary so incompetent State Dept spam filters were blocking her correspondence
June 27, 2016 at 1:31 pm
(June 27, 2016 at 12:25 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: I think that means that Spam filters are incompetent. Mine seem to only block the people I actually want to hear from.
Spam filters are hit and miss because they are attempts at trying to fix system which is broken at the design level. If we were to go back in time an invent email from scratch, it would be handled differently.
Your basic spam filter tries to match common spam message signatures, much like a basic anti-virus will attempt to match the signature of a particular piece of malicious code. Of course, this means staying on top of all the different types of spam message being sent. It gets trickier because some people will include words / phrases which are legitimate in the context of the email, but look like spam to the filter. If your mother emails you about a new product she bought and recommends to you, to a spam filter, that may look like a piece of spam (advertising).
More advanced spam filters operate on a trust system to eliminate a large proportion of spam messages. They reason that if you've ever sent an email to an address which has been marked as spam, it probably wasn't spam. For example, if you've sent an email to your mother wishing her a happy birthday, then your email system will likely mark your mother's email address as not-spam, and her messages will get through OK. The same applies for adding people to your contact list.
Even more advanced still, are email "addon" protocols like DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), SPF records, and DMARC policies, which rely on senders of the email to set up various configurations on their email system, DNS, etc. to allow receiving email systems to check messages for veracity.
