Thursday, May 10, 2007

What if the word "Lottery" signified Spam?

I've gotten a lot of spam about winning lotteries. I bet you have too. Today I wondered why ANY emails with the word "lottery" sneak through spam filters. Isn't "lottery" a near certain tipoff that the email is spam?

So I imagined myself a programmer at a company that writes email spam filters. I want to write a rule to say that any email with the word "lottery" will go into the spam box, not the inbox. Now what will happen if I filter out an email about somebody ACTUALLY, TRULY winning a lottery, such that the recipient never finds out until it's too late, and never collects million$ of dollar$. I'll be in hiding for the rest of my life, that's what. I'd rather be Salman Rushdie than write a spam "lottery" filter.

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