Headers

[stoutfellow]

During his visit last year, mbernardi showed me how to configure Pegasus to allow me to download the headers of my e-mail messages, rather than the messages themselves; I can then pick and choose which messages I want downloaded, which I want deleted outright, and which I want to stay on the university server. This has been extremely handy; but identifying spam is sometimes harder than it sounds.

One of the mailing lists I belong to is that of the American Dialect Society, which (among other things) often discusses unusual words and phrases. Unfortunately, messages from that list are not marked as such, and sometimes it's a little hard to distinguish them from spam. I mean, what would you do about messages with subject headers like these?

Perfect storm, not negative
Happy Gay
curebie
Why Swedish is a backward language
Shoes sans toes
"Anal astigmatism" bad
Court rules you can't swear like a
Loses Something -- But Not Color --
Lesbos Lite

(Explanations will be provided upon request.)

Comments

Re: gmail

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but I'm pretty happy with the current setup. The university has a good filter; it catches about 90% of the spam that I'm sent, with very few false positives (almost always ADS-L posts). It's that remaining 10% that I have to deal with, and it's almost always obvious.

I posted this more because I found the headers amusing than because I was upset about anything.