puter talk

[jlat]

hello peoples peoples; I have a question to you puter heads. How does your E-mail know it it's spam or not?
I just opened it and there was stuff there I wouldn't call spam.
IBBY

 

[klrv6]

Which email program? Webmail?

 

[jlat]

Which email program? Webmail?

hello peoples; It's on my AOL account.
IBBY

 

[klrv6]

You're email is being filtered on AOl's servers. It's their system that follows pattern for known spam and scores each message based on the probability of spam when compared against known spam. The message you were concerned about may have been very close to what their filter flags. The sender, subject, message and frequency of sending are all considered.

You should be able to mark that sender as safe so it doesn't happen again.

 

[Little6pack]

Hope your still not paying for AOL?? When you can get afree Yahoo or Gmail or hotmail free

 

[85Dan85TType]

Basically, it "reads" the email, looking to see if anything in it matches known patterns for spam; the types of words used, how they try to be creative and get around it (saying "v1agra" instead of "viagra" when they try to sell you penis pills).

Suffice to say, it's pretty complicated how they do it, if you want to know a little more, do a search for "regular expressions"; they're kind of complicated, and really awesome.

Here's a small article I found that does an okay job of describing how it works.

How Spam Filters Think