oh wow it's gmail

[sethg at ropine.com (Seth Gordon)]

Eric wrote:
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> I keep hearing about gmail.  People seem to want invitations to open
> free accounts.  The memory available isn't that exciting.  Roll your own
> and have all you want.  Smells like tricky marketing no?

I suspect that the spam filter in gmail is second to none.  Consider 
what Google has on their side:

(1) If someone sends almost-identical messages to several gmail 
subscribers simultaneously, and those subscribers have never exchanged 
email with one another, the filter's algorithms can mark it for extra 
scrutiny on that basis alone.

(2) Most spam messages contain links to Web sites.  Since Google is 
spidering the Web anyway, they can not only analyze the text of the 
message, but the contents of whatever page the message points to.

(3) Google has already spent years developing techniques for smoking out 
people who try to artificially inflate their page rank or people who are 
clicking on ads to artificially generate revenue for advertisers.  By 
now, they must have a trick or two up their sleeve that would be useful 
for smoking out anyone trying to work around their spam filters.

(4) Google's clusters of servers are essentially one giant distributed 
operating system (http://blog.topix.net/archives/000016.html).  There 
must be a few text-processing algorithms that are feasible on that 
system that would be infeasible on a regular ISP's mail server.

(Despite all that, I do not have a gmail account [yet].  I run my own 
mail and IMAP server at home, and I use dspam for spam filtering.)

// seth gordon // http://dynamic.ropine.com/yo/ // std. disclaimer