I Was Addicted to Spam
How did I end up spending more time training my e-mail filter than I ever did hitting Delete?
If you've had to deal much with software developers, chances are you've formed the impression that they come from another planet. (If, by chance, you are a software developer, you may well feel the same about end users.) I came to realize this when I got involved with the beta test of a new spam-blocking service introduced by my ISP. Here at work, hidden behind multiple firewalls and filters, and with highly trained IT support staff on 24-hour call, I feel cocooned, my e-mail in-box isolated from the nastiness that is the Internet. That's not the case with my personal mailbox, which seems to fill up with spam as soon as I click the Disconnect button. Last month brought me 3278 junk e-mail messages, and the months before that were almost as bad. On a Mission The problem with spam is that the battle to keep it out of our in-boxes can become something of a personal crusade, almost an addiction. You can probably tell that was the case for me from the all-too-precise tally of the damage. The epiphany came for me when I realized I was spending more time teaching the adaptive filter on my home computer how to cull the spam from messages that I would want to read than I ever spent just hitting Delete. But I had to wean myself off the addiction gradually. I couldn't just go cold turkey, giving up the anxious scanning of blocked messages to see if the filters had gone too far. So when my ISP invited me to take part in the beta test of a new spam-blocking filter that would keep the stuff out of my in-box for good, I figured this was my chance: A couple of weeks spent gradually reducing the time I spent identifying and tagging spam, a final report to the beta testers, and I'd be cured, free of this crippling addiction. Believe it or not, that's pretty much what happened: I cut down, and down, and eventually stopped. I'm amazed at how fresh life tastes without that continual bitterness directed against spammers. Occasionally a wisp of the old evil will drift across my path, like the fumes that spill over into the nonsmoking section at my favorite restaurant, but that just makes the feeling of freedom all the keener. Wish List Like the most zealous of ex-smokers, I was keen to impart my discovery to the beta-test team, to tell them how much more fun life is when you're not wasting time fine-tuning spam filters. I wanted to help them make their software save users' time, rather than swallow up as much of their time as the problem it attempts to solve. "Build a white list function so that wanted messages are never thrown away. That way, users won't be glued to their screens, worried they've missed an important message," I told them. And knowing how long it would take the average person to type in all their friends' e-mail addresses without making a mistake, I suggested, "Make it simple for users to upload their address books from their PDA, from Outlook, from Yahoo, from Lotus Notes." At first the developers were receptive to my comments, but maybe it was the mention of Lotus Notes that pushed them over the edge. "White listing will take too much CPU time," they said, condemning their customers to remain slaves to the server. Truly, we are not from the same planet.
Reproduced from an article published by PC World
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