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Mon May 03 2004 18:23 Gaming the Inbox:
I do have a nice fat new crop to post here soon (teaser trailer:
In other words, is spam getting you down? Start your own spamblog today!
Make.her Bed.for It), but first I wanted to link to an article by Tycho of Penny Arcade. He discusses what it's like to own a five-year-old address on a high-traffic site, and how he's come to view it:
When the viruses began to hit, the viruses that harvest e-mails from files sitting in your temporary browser directories, I declared that Spam had essentially won and that human dialogue had been crushed. ...Tycho's referring in that second part to his newly obtained Bayesian spam filter, a method perhaps most famously implemented in NewsBruiser. What struck a chord with me, though, was the phrase "game my inbox." That's exactly what SAFA has allowed me to do. Spam has become psychological warfare on a massive scale, perhaps the most intrusive method of advertising yet devised, because we have to inspect each piece with a diminishing hope of getting real, important information. But gaming the inbox allows us to turn the mental tables--it stops being a pain and becomes a somewhat enjoyable distraction.
The most important thing for me isn't that it is snaring Spam, as much as I hate that stuff. It's a psychological shift that has allowed me to "game" my inbox and look at unsolicited mail in a new way. I'm actually excited to get spam now, because every new entreaty from a nonexistent cheerleader improves my learning filter and reduces spammer efficiency.
In other words, is spam getting you down? Start your own spamblog today!