Imagine you have to keep 40,000 people happy. Now imagine that 200 or 300 of those people are PESTERING you constantly to do something about a particular problem. Nobody else seems to particularly care. So you do something. Now everyone hates you for it, or so it seems.

I’ll agree that the spam filter could use some work. It triggers on stuff from my professors/TAs (although some of that may well be properly labeled).

It’s been known to flag some stuff from mailing lists I subscribe to. But overall, a message with #### or more “spam tags” is pretty darn likely to be something that I don’t care to read.

Everyone seems to be complaining about the spam filter, but no one is offering a better solution. Deleting spam isn’t a viable option. Let’s consider several possible ways to delete “sure-fire spam”: If it has “XXX” in the title line, it must be spam. Great. Now any sports fan who is subscribing to anything having to do with Super Bowl XXX through Super Bowl XXXVII gets their message deleted. And Joe down the hall happens to like waking up to his “XXX Pic of the Day” e-mail.

If it’s from a foreign mail server, it’s probably spam. Look around. How many foreign students do you see? Depending on your major, probably quite a few. They want to get news from home and family.

If anyone has a better method to deal with spam, I’m sure AIT is open to suggestions. But for now, I’ll be content filtering my #### mail to a “spam” folder that I check every few days.

Russell Graves

Junior

Computer Engineering