[FRIAM] Message to the non-posting 95%

[Steve Smith]

I don't let my spam filter automatically file my spam...  I visually
scan the subjects and senders and depend on my peripheral vision to
notice spam markers... if something is suspected spam but *isn't* I
notice pretty close to real-time which means that there isn't a lot of
negative reinforcement for false-positives.   I also try to be
thoughtful about what I mark as spam... I don't for example, call things
I simply am not interested in as spam.  Before I do a "delete spam" or
"move marked to spam folder" I scan again, just on principle... I *very*
rarely catch anything in that scan but you know "belt and suspenders"....

I try to limit who I "subscribe" to and then whack-a-mole the allies
that seem to spill over.  ActBlue and/or ButtigeigForPrez and/or
BernieIsSoCoolItHurts seem to have gleefully given my e-mail address to
another half-dozen or so other campaigns (DitchMitch, MakeGeorgiaBlue,
OMGtheRedStatesAreComing, etc.) who then flooded me.   For a while they
were a hydra it seemed... and I WAS tempted to overtrain my spam filter
and send it direct to a folder or trash but got through it without doing
that.  

Finally, after November I started unsubscribing from the campaigns I
knew I'd opted into (even if by sly accident) and included an admonition
that if THEY were the source of all the side-spam, they should rethink,
because it ended up *inhibiting* my support for their cause(s)... though
I am not sure that was very significant.



On 1/28/21 9:48 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:

> It's a bit funny. I can't remember who they are. But there are some rare posters whose posts go into GMail spam. It's as if GMail has a similar feature to Spamassassin's *ham* learner. Like the lurker who posts rarely is drowned out as spam because I've allowed the frequent posters to out-ham them. If that's the case, maybe Roger's filter is inverted and has noticed he simply doesn't like *repetitive* stuff. So where mine filters out the rare posters, his filters out the blowhards.
>
> Or, maybe it's because Google has robots who read our emails and the posts they let through are actually a kind of marketing *upsell* technique. "Oh, I see you've failed to mark blatherings from Glen as spam. That means I'll present you with ads for blatherings from The Epoch Times."
>
> I'm thinking about switching to Mailo or Zoho for trash email addresses like my GMail ones. I don't think they read them but who knows?
>
> On 1/27/21 6:14 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> Roger is just saying we are boring and that he ignores our posts.  gmail follows his preferences.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2021 5:20 PM
>> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Message to the non-posting 95%
>>
>> The question I have is whether the similarity is mostly in the payload or mostly in the metadata. I welcome clues from any spam-gurus. I also think it depends on the extent to which your filter is crowdsourced, as well. It strikes me that GMail (and such) users have an economy of scale in recognizing spam that offline bayes filterers don't have.
>>
>> It would be a fun, but maybe cruel prank to play on someone to get all your friends to mark all emails from some poor shlub as spam so that Google users worldwide began sending their emails to spam.
>>
>> On 1/27/21 5:07 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>>> This whole thread went into my gmail spam folder.
>>>
>>>
>>>     Why is this message in spam?
>>>
>>> It is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past.
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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