Tim on July 2nd, 2008

Finally installed the very excellent reCAPTCHA plugin for WordPress. I like it when my posts get comments, I don’t like it when the comments are spam. So, if you look at the comment field on this blog, it’s got the reCAPTCHA interface hanging out, keeping us safe. Also, reCAPTCHA helps decode books. Awesome!
You should post […]

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Tim on June 4th, 2008

OK. I’ve been running a test where I’ve been attempting to gather Viagra spam into a Gmail mailbox, viagraspamtest@gmail.com
I started the test in mid-May, posting the email address to questionable and shady mailing lists, as well as linking the address in plain text on my blog.
And 6 weeks in, how is it going? Well…it’s not. […]

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Tim on April 15th, 2008

My buddy Kevin saw my previous post on training Gmail to deliver only Viagra spam, as well as the part about how Pfizer must handle their spam filtering.
Being an enterprising person, he emailed Pfizer. Here’s their reply:

From: pfizer@pfizer.com
Date: April 15, 2008 12:53:23 PM EDT
To: EMAIL

Subject: RE:Email Validation

This email is sent by the Pfizer server. In […]

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Tim on April 14th, 2008

At the end of my presentation on Bayes’ Theorem at BarCampOrlando, there was some Q&A time.
I was asked a question about automatically training a spam filter, and I got into explaining how Bayesian filtering isn’t a “spam test” per-se. The simplest way to think about Bayesian filtering is that you sort email you’ve already received […]

Continue reading about Training Gmail: Sit. Stay. Good Gmail.