About a month or so ago, the amount of spam that I receive on a day to day basis seemed to have dramatically increased. As an effort to fight off these unwanted messages, I started searching for an advanced spam filtering plugin for Apple Mail. After 2 weeks of trying out SpamSieve, I'm about to make this configuration permanent. Here are the stats for my first couple weeks. Keep in mind, this includes training the software so as time goes on the filtering gets better and better.

Filtered Mail
299 Good Messages
2369 Spam Messages (89%)
135 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy
47 False Positives
21 False Negatives (31%)
97.5% Correct

Corpus
299 Good Messages
552 Spam Messages (65%)
46670 Total Words

Rules
44 Blocklist Rules
201 Whitelist Rules

Showing Statistics Since
3/14/05 9:25 AM

Responses[4]

Posted by Mike Shoemaker on March 31, 2005 9:11:55 PM CST #

I disagree 100% with the statements made in Dion's blog entry. Computer Science is not about solving real world problems; it's about theory and learning how to think. In my CS program, I enjoyed writing programs to solve the Towers of Hanoi, 8 Queens Problem, and The Sieve of Eratosthenes. These problems were much more enlightening than adding a feature to a piece of otherwise working code. If "good schools" were to take this approach, they would become more like trade schools and that would be disappointing.

With that being said, I don't think that offering a course on the practical application of Software Development would be a bad thing. It just shouldn't be the driver of the program.

Responses[5]

Posted by Mike Shoemaker on March 31, 2005 12:22:57 PM CST #