Re: Blocked?

["Chuck Martin" <cm -at- writeforyou -dot- com>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca>


> Chuck Martin reports one of his e-mail messages being blocked: <<"It
> contains language that is inappropriate for company use." ... What on
Earth
> did I say??>>
>
> Rogue though you are, you're probably completely innocent. <g> Spam
filters
> are a blight upon the Earth that (in my experience) often become worse
than
> the problem they're intended to solve.

I would tend to disagree (blacklists are worse) only because of my own
experience. My ISP (for my personal Internet access) uses a program called
SpamAssassin. This past weekend it caught every single one of a deluge of
virus-infected emails.

I normally get 6-10 spams a day, and a single email a day listing what
SpamCatcher caught. Rarely does it stop something that should have gotten
through (and usually it's been a newsletter that I've subscribed to). Last
weekend that number shot up to more than 100 per day. When I looked at what
was caught, almost all were signature Subject lines of Sobig-carrying
emails. They never got to my own PCs.

What's onerous in addition to blacklists, are content filters, and that's
what this is, not a spam filter.

I had forgotten about the s-word that I quoted; I thought it was from a
different post. But if they can say it dozens of times on TV (the infamous
South Park episode--and they had a counter on screen documenting every
instance, a real classic), and if it's in a good dictionary, and if it's
been used by countless CEOs in countless boardrooms (as in Enrons: "S---,
we've been caught!), it seems like a perfectly good business word to me.  :)


> The techwr-l tie-in is pretty weak, but here's an attempt: If you're
working
> on documenting one of these evil bits of malware, work with the developers
> to implement more sensible default filtering rules, and write
documentation
> that teaches administrators to minimize false positives. Even if you're
not
> working on spam filters, remember that your experience as a user of this
and
> other software is valuable, and developers should take advantage of it.
Give
> them a reason to listen to you, and start talking.
>
Recently I saw a TW job posting for Gator. I was even reasonably qualified.
But that company makes particularly nasty software and is not something I'd
want to contribute to inflicting on the world.

Chuck Martin