![](\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/dowbrigade\/evilemail.jpg\")
For
\n a while there it was looking as though email was becoming obsolete and
\n impossible to use. Our emailboxes (all half dozen
\n of them) were filling up constantly with ridiculous come-ons, fantastic
\n products and transparent scams, and picking out the real messages from
\n the Spam was like finding the truth on a major candidate’s web site –
\n it may be there somewhere, but you’ve gotta wade through a whole lotta
\n shit to find it. We were resigned to going back to snail mail.<\/p>\n
Then some unnamed genius named Bayes came up with Bayesian
\n filtering, and suddenly the three real messages were floating to the
\n top of the three hundred junkers. It seemed like a miracle! The penis
\n enlargers
\n and urgent letters from the ex-Nigerian Finance Ministers were exiled
\n to a cold and dark corner of our virtual world, to stew and plot
\n in obscurity. E-mail was back!<\/p>\n
Now, alas, the process has come full circle. It came to
\n our attention, after numerous missed meetings, forgotten birthdays and
\n unclaimed cash rewards, that a number of extremely NON-JUNK
\n mails were ending up in the old trash bin! Our filters were out of control!<\/p>\n
It took us quite a while to catch on. At first, when
\n entire classes of students swore up and down that they had emailed their
\n essays to me over the weekend, we sneered and called them slackers. But
\n when we almost lost an offer of paying work (an editing job from a Dowbrigade
\n reader in China – the first remuneration produced by our short, sweet life as
\n a blogger) we
\n realized something was seriously amiss.<\/p>\n
Of course, we were horrified to discover, in our Junk mailbox,
\n nestled among the Vic*din and the instant PhD’s, our missing messages.
\n So now we are reduced to not only reviewing our half-dozen inboxes, but
\n also wading through the bulging Junk mailbox as well! When we find a
\n misfiled message, it take us three clicks and a drag-and-drop to rescue
\n the message and supposedly "re-train" our Mail program to avoid these
\n gaffes in the future.<\/p>\n
But it’s not working! We are now spending TWICE as much
\n time wading through our mail as when the Junk and Not Junk were just
\n jumbled together into one big box! We are right back to where we started
\n – only worse.<\/p>\n
So let us apologize to all of the slighted relatives,
\n unanswered students, unresponded-to offers and missed opportunities. If
\n we don’t get this figured out soon, we all might have to start buying
\n stamps again.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For a while there it was looking as though email was becoming obsolete and impossible to use. Our emailboxes (all half dozen of them) were filling up constantly with ridiculous come-ons, fantastic products and transparent scams, and picking out the real … Continue reading