Thunder cracked so I cracked back.

[reddragdiva]

I decided not to wait for a contrib build of Thunderbird 0.4 for FreeBSD. No - being insane, I decided to try building it myself. First time through, I ran out of disk space. (Mozilla's arse is FAT.) Second attempt, something obscure died two-thirds of the way through, and I really can't be arsed to fix it. Bah. I have downloaded the French build again, now that it's up. (You can tell it to speak Engrish.) It includes Enigmail, so I may even try harder to remember my GPG pass phrase.

The spammers have discovered a new and particularly low and scurvy trick. You know the worst form of cube mail: badly-written glurge meant to raise your spirits and be forwarded to your address book to brighten their trash folders in turn. Today's had an admonition at the bottom to forward it to two other people ... and an ad for the spammer who sent it. I only read that far to work out whether it was spam, having not recognised the sender.

This, of course, raises an important research question for computer science: can Bayesian filtering detect and dispose of stupid email jokes? I'll be doing my bit to find out.

Update: redcountess says the 'send' button doesn't work in this build. However, the menu item and Control-Enter both work fine. Does the button work in the official Linux build? (I'd be very surprised if it didn't work in the Windows one.) Update: She says it's working okay now. w31rd.

Comments

[benton.livejournal.com]

This, of course, raises an important research question for computer science: can Bayesian filtering detect and dispose of stupid email jokes? I'll be doing my bit to find out.

Pseudocode on...

if
title: "fwd+fwd+fwd"
then
nukeit

...pseduocode off.

[poggs.livejournal.com]

I know at least two people who blindly forward on shite to me. One of them forwarded me a mail by Dave Barry - "Sixteen Things blahblahblah", and when I checked t'Interweb, his own site only had fourteen things. Somebody had added two 'things' to the list, one of which was distinctly anti-male and pro-female. Upon emailing the sender back, I got the reply "You learn something new every day!"

I suggest we get rid of people who mindlessly forward email, who believe Microsoft can track all messages, who believe ICQ *will* be shut down unless you forward a "petition message" to everyone on your contact list - "DON'T THINK JUST FORWARD".

[reddragdiva]

Can we highlight their heads, click on the 'junk' icon and apply Bayesian logic to the two or three thoughts in their brain, so as to clear them from our view for later checking at our leisure? It's worth a try!

[poggs.livejournal.com]

They only lose their ability to think for themselves when in front of a computer.....





....like most users :)

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

can Bayesian filtering detect and dispose of stupid email jokes?

It's harder to NOT detect such as spam, I, for one, had to whitelist some lusers for that.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

I have been strongly tempted to set up a filter so that anything with "Fwd:" in the subject line goes straight into the Junk folder and worry about sifting anything wanted if the person concerned tells me they are forwarding it. As far as I'm concerned, if you sent it unsolicited I don't want to know. It's only polite to ask first.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Gaaah...

Another thing I don't miss about the Outside World.

When I did get such things, I'd just email them back with a URL pointing at kumite.com. Usually I'd get a screenful of abuse by return.

[ Sigh ]