Eudora had its chili-pepper system that scanned for rude words on incoming or outgoing messages, but apart from a few pattern-matches—GMail’s detection of tracking numbers and dates—there seems to be little that takes advantage of linguistic analysis to distinguish the multi-forwarded stuff from one’s mother-in-law from the other stuff. Which means, alas, that it all goes into a mailbox to be looked at when I’m sufficiently fortified.

The Bayesian algorithms are there, and the corpus is there (if you consent to your emails being indexed, that is). But there’s apparently no demand, just as my prediction proved false that there’d be seamless PGP encryption and identity verification in every email client by now.

I look forward to reading this material, as I often think about cc and bcc and such, and I wonder about what I should send to whom, particularly jokes or, say, nuggets on blogs like Crooked Timber!

I was speaking to [My Boss] today and he suggested that I get you to give us an idea on how long it would take to complete the tasks for the [Product] upgrade. Based on your earlier comments I didn’t think it would take very long. We would like to make sure we have a version for test by mid June.

You would think a simple addition to most spam filters/white lists would be that any email that you reply to should be assumed to be to a non-spam address unless you explicitly tell it so, to avoid having to update so often. Not that even then I would trust a filter even so.

What I have done for personal email is to have a published address (which is basically just the oldest one I have), that is used for signing on for stuff (amazon, blogs like this, boards, or whatever) and a private address that is only used for friends/family, and hence doesnt need any filtering.

Email as an application has continued to become less valuable (to me at least), just because spam makes it less reliable and more work. Compared to 15 years ago when it was amazingly useful when most of the people I knew suddenly spread out across the country (and a few years later all over the world). I tend to use private groups, skype (thats getting some spam now as its grown) and IRC channels mostly now.

Comparing my mailbox to my wife’s is instructive: she gets all-too-regular circulars and forwards from friends and relatives (who are even more recent adopters).

It sometimes feels as if my circle of friends has gravitated towards communicating on personal blogs (or livejournals with restricted access) in a more sophisticated version of what ‘ver kids’ apparently do these days with IM and MySpace.