The Day Thus Far

Today I've started answering the phone for support questions. Most of them are things I don't know how to do yet, so I end up transferring them to my supervisor, to to his email. Been answering a few more email tickets, doing quite well at them. Customers have been saying nice things about me. This is great!

I updated my essay journal again, in light of a news story that rather amused me.

I wish there was a way to stick a link to my essay journal here on my livejournal page, right under the "homepage" link at the top of the page. But it doesn't seem there's any really easy way to do it, I'd have to get into making my own style and editing it and all sorts of rigamarole and it just doesn't seem to be worth the fuss. (On the other hand, I was able to stick a link to my livejournal on my essay journal page with about two minutes of trial and error. Go figure.)

Today I talked to a fellow on the bus who I've seen riding for the last several days. He's a fellow biker—and it's good that he's the only one who seems to ride this stretch, because there are only two slots on the busfront bike rack—and an Apple user with a 15-gig iPod. He's a java programmer for a travel company; I expect to be sharing a lot of five-minute bus rides to work with him over the weeks to come. Kind of funny, to get to know someone for just five minutes at a time.

The Email Filter that "Bayes" at the Moon

So, like any red-blooded American 'netter these days, I've been getting waaaaay too much spam email. At first, I attempted to get rid of most of it by sorting anything that was only bcc'd to me (that is, email that was only addressed to me "invisibly") into a separate "might be spam" folder to check every so often (after sorting all my mailing lists into their own folders). The problem was, I didn't check it often enough, and it got a lot of false positives—mailing lists I never bothered to set up filtering rules for, or lists for which the filtering rules weren't quite right, and other things. And after a while, spamming software started sending out individual emails to people instead of one single email to a thousand bcc'd, and so the messages would wind up in my inbox anyway.

After that, I set up SpamAssassin on my box, and it did a fairly decent job of sorting out the wheat from the chaff, but after a while it just wasn't working very well either. I was about at my wit's end; my in-box's usefulness was declining fast.

Until I finally got around to looking at how to set up SpamAssassin's Bayesian filtering function.

( What it is and how it works )

Bayesian filtering is working well enough so far that I've gone ahead and disabled the ineffective bcc sorting, and moved SpamAssassin from being the last step in the sort (previously I had sorted all the mailing lists into their own mailboxes before I ran SpamAssassin on the rest, not wanting to take the chance it would declare mailing list posts to be spam) to the first (so hopefully now it will remove even those spam posts that come over mailing lists while leaving the rest of the lists untouched).

Maybe I should see whether any good Bayesian apps are available for Windows and get Mom & Dad set up with one. Or have Aaron do it.