| "...Inboxes were suddenly free of offers for prescription medicines, mortgage refinances, crude erotica and all the other mainstays of the spam economy. Regular email life could resume--spam-free. It looked like another victory for technology in the hands of the good guys... [However] the antispam system had been so effective because it had labeled as spam just about everything that was even remotely suspect... Naturally, a huge percentage of the emails weren't spam at all. Our freedom from spam had come at a stiff price -- a very high false-positive rate.
How bad was it?
I took a good long look at a few days' worth of messages in my spam bucket. There were 192 in all. Sorting them by hand into "real mail" and "actual spam," I figured that some 46% were legitimate messages that had been flagged as spam. Of these, most were news releases from companies, including VMWare, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Notices from Purdue University, the Semiconductor Industry Association and Forbes Magazine also were blocked."
See full Wednesday, June 18, 2008 Wall Street Journal article |