Anarchogeek

Gmail, 230 days worth of email.... and thoughts about spam filtering and cultural norms of communication

I've been trying out my gmail account. It's a cool system, allows for some interesting faceted classification. It's interface for filters is immature, but given the quality of everything else, i expect it'll improve.

What worries me is the space limit. I know, 1 gig sounds like a lot, but i've been storing my email offline, and apparently i get a lot of email. In the three day's i've averaged 4.33 megs of incoming email per day. That means that my gmail account will be full in 230 days, or the beginning of April. One of the reasons i have such a high level of email is spam. Gmail appears to count my spam folder as part of my quota.

The spam filter is pretty good, it seems to have a lot of false positives for emails in Italian, which may reflect how the italian's emotion intensive way of writing emails and communicating follows some of the same attention grabbing methods of spam. To a lesser degree i've also had false positives on the email from Uruguayans, which would make sense, they are mostly decedents of italian immigrants.

It's interesting how cultural norms of interaction play in to spam filters. What would be abusive in one culture is normal in another, and the other way around, i know italians and rioplatenses (people from buenos aires and montevideo) who complain about 'cold people' who are anti social and don't exhibit their emotions in a way which can be read. If we train our emails for the norms of anglo culture, then we can unwittingly exclude culturally acceptable communication as spam when it happens in other cultures. Perhaps the filters should be parallel by language instead of combining them.