Eats, shoots and spam's

[andygates]

Ain't grammar wonderful?  You can use it to detect bogosity.  What kind of person thinks that this is a convincing PayPal alert:



When you can make a healthy living from one in a million respondents, does it matter how lame your message is?  If you're dealing with the bottom millionth of the bell curve, I doubt that a misplaced apostrophe will make a jot of difference.  Those users, the same people who have trouble working out 20% off sale prices, are saying, "Urgh, it sez paypal so it wuz from paypal, innit," but, arguably (social Darwinism notwithstanding) they're the very users who need protection the most.

What I need is a spam filter that parses grammar and decides that things like this are rubbish.  "Paypal don't send stuff with exclamations in and misplaced apostrophes" - a perfectly simple rule for humans, but a toughie for our whirring and bleeping slaves.

Comments

[ravenbait.livejournal.com]

Can't you wildcard ascii characters in a matched filter with the purported sender?

IF sender = *@paypal.com AND subject header includes *!* THEN trash that motherfucker

[andygates.livejournal.com]

For the exclamation, perhaps, but what is a misplaced apostrophe - bearing in mind that mail subjects are almost always fragments of sentences (which confuse grammar checkers a la MS Word)?

And how high maintenance would that be? It's not something one of the 40-Watt Club could do. It's not even something they realise could be done or needs to be done, which is really where the problem is with very naive users. The out-of-the-box spam cure is one of those golden products and still doesn't exist.

Yahoo's isn't bad, using user reports to identify spam and applying those reports (with some weighting, it seems) across the whole language community, but suffers from excessive positives.

Should I stop worrying and just join in exploiting the peasants?

[ravenbait.livejournal.com]

Oh. Right. For the seething biomass.

Can't help you there, I'm afraid. I'm still chuckling over moonmadeofcheese.com

[jonnycowbells.livejournal.com]

I once got a letter (a photocopy) full of terrible grammatical mistakes and purporting to be regarding my credit card, even though it was from a company other than my credit card company.

I duly called my credit card company to report the fraud and was told "No, that's right - it's from our mail delivery partner."

It's a f***ing disgrace, frankly.