Fuddland
Yes, sorry, yet more talk about spam. It’s a fairly hot topic at the moment, regardless of those essays I am trying to forget I ever read, what with a new report indicating things are getting worse and worse.
Wanadoo have announced new anti-spam tools for their webmail service: automatic filtering of spam into a junk mail folder, and the facility to train this filter through the use of “spam” and “not spam” buttoms.
This sounds all well and good, except I was slightly perturbed by this paragraph in their email describing this new service:
Occasionally our spam filters may mistake a genuine email for spam and tag it. If we have tagged a genuine message to you, you can now report this by selecting the tagged email and clicking on the new “Not Spam” button. The email will then be sent to our anti-spam team, who will review and use it to train our system’s filters.
[My emphasis. A similar description can be found in their webmail help pages.] That last sentence smacks of “invasion of privacy” to me, with no choice to opt-out, and is precisely what all the controversy surrounding Google’s Gmail service was all about: whilst Google kept emphasising that no human would actually read anyone’s emails in the process of providing bespoke advertisements, Wanadoo’s policy seems to imply that this is indeed what will happen — and no-one wants complete strangers to “review” a private email which a filter suspected was spam.
Okay, taking off my Nicky Campbell hat now…
Update. Case in point: my booking confirmation/itinerary for a flight I booked today was marked as spam by Wanadoo’s filter. Luckily I don’t use the webmail and just download my email via POP; had I been using their web-based service the message would lie in my junk mail folder until I realised [if ever] that it was there, at which point I’d have naturally clicked the “not spam” button and all my flight details would be copied to Wanadoo’s crack team of spam analysts for them to peruse.
