Spamity Spam

My spam filter at work sucks.

My gmail filter is remarkably good. It captures spam wonderfully, and lets through all kinds of non-spam. On this account in particular, I get tons of spam. And I know I don't expect much mail here. Even on my other gmail account, I rarely get spam, and when I do, it's in the Spam filter.

At work, however, my spam filter sucks.

At the beginning of each day, I open Outlook, which then downloads all the mail that's accumulated through the night. Not usually a big event, except that usually there are at least 50 items of junk email in there along with the legitimate stuff. Heck, I'm even being generous by defining email from vendors who legitimately have my address as "not spam."

Then my spam filter kicks in, and tells me it's "working." It tells me it's scanning new mail for spam. And at the end, it brags to me that it's quarantined 5 spam messages!

Except that there are like 45 more spam messages still in my inbox.

How many unnamed persons have to send me e-postcards before this damn filter system will recognize that to be spam? I've had friends, and family members, and neighbours [sic], and school mates, and acquaintances, and business associates, and even worshippers send me e-postcards. Poor dears will never get in touch with me at this rate.

The stupidest thing is, when I click on those emails and then hit "Is Spam," the software is supposed to, somehow, learn what spam looks like and start blocking these things on their own for a while. Indeed, the damn software will hold up my computer for a while with a damn window that says "Learning... Please wait." as if it could figure out cues about what is spam. As these postcards show, though, clearly it isn't working. The word "postcard", by the way, has never shown up in a legitimate email of mine yet. At least not in my work email.

Technology. Gotta love it.