telecom, Delete: Bathwater. Undelete: Baby.

By KATIE HAFNER

LIKE many people these days, Jason Kim and Linda Crasco rely heavily
on e-mail for their work, running a small educational research and
evaluation company in Norwood, Mass. And like many people, they get
plenty of spam, some 400 pieces of unwanted e-mail daily.

So when their company, Systemic Research, first installed a spam
filter 18 months ago, they were impressed by the noticeable reduction
in the amount of spam they received.

Several months ago, Dr. Kim and Mrs. Crasco were at a meeting when
they ran into a program director they knew from the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. She greeted them coolly.
Puzzled, Dr. Kim and Mrs. Crasco asked what they might have done to
offend her.

As it turned out, she had sent Dr. Kim and Mrs. Crasco an e-mail
message suggesting that they work together on a grant application.
The application deadline had since passed, and the acquaintance was
more than a little miffed that she had gotten no response from them.

The two entrepreneurs were flabbergasted. Not only did they have no
idea the e-mail had been sent, they had no idea that it had been
snuffed out as junk.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/05/technology/circuits/05filt.html

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This is the reason why I at least give
a cursory glance at everything in the spam bucket before dumping it
out. There is that occassional item in the spam bucket which should
not be there. (I wish it was true the other way around also, but it
is not.) And for all the improvements and sophistication which
have gone into mechanical message filtering in recent years, the
English language (at least) is just to complex in its actual usage
to build in all the filter rules as perfectly as we would like. No
matter what you are attempting to filter out, from occassional obscene
words which have a jillion ways to spell them incorrectly and parse
them inappropriatly in order to avoid the filter, through entire
messages or entire web sites; like the millions/billions variations
on DNA, there just is no way to catch it all without catching 'too
much' in the processs. Nothing will ever replace the human brain, an
equally complex and sophisticated organ in combating (either pro or
con) the filters put up by machines, since, after all, humans were
the inventors of those machines and their filters anyway. Even my
eyes, in their cursory examination of 'what is spam' misses some of
it now and then. If anything, I would rather impose on myself a
little to avoid cases such as in this message from Monty. PAT]

TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to Monty Solomon
< XXXX@XXXXX.COM >:


Feh. The fault is solely the other people for not USING A PHONE to back up
an email contact, especially if the two parties have never communicated
before.

It sounds like a made-up story anyway, or at least a garbled one. *

* PV something like badgers--something like lizards--and something
like corkscrews.

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: However, Paul, I am not in a position
to use the telephone either to call submitters and let them know their
message was received, nor to receive telephone calls from people who
want to know did I receive their message and when if ever it will be
used in the Digest. What kind of email volume do the people involved
in this story get in a day's time. I've had people write here who do
not know an auto-ack is sent out who have been quite indignant with me
for allegedly 'ignoring' them. PAT]