Web-enabling the world of business

We’re taking a different approach to spam these days. We’ve installed SpamAssassin to help us identify it. And we’re modifying the headers so our clients can decide what to do with it.

Basically, SpamAssassin has a big list of rules. Each message is compared against the rules. If it mentions “viagra,” it gets a positive score. There are positive scores and negative scores. At the end of the comparisons, the total is calculated and SA determines if it should classify the message as spam or not (ham). The default, out of the box setting is to classify each email with a score of above 5 to be spam. We’re currently using 8 as our benchmark, and erring on the cautious side.

On the flip side of the coin, some messages score very highly; 20, 22, et cetera. We’re taking all messages that score above 15 and marking them as definately spam. Actually, “marking” isn’t the right word. We’re vaporizing them into their constituent electrons and using them to power the coffee pot.

If you’re one of our clients, you can configure a filter in your email program to filter out all messages with a specific header. If you can use a “custom header”, I recommend setting it to send all messages that contain “X-Spam-Score: ******” to a separate folder that you can look at and determine if it’s working for you (and delete them once a week). If you have to use the Subject line, match something like “**** SPAM ****” and send those to the same folder. Once you determine your own level of acceptance, you can set the filter to delete rather than store those messages.

We have been working underground as far as this blog is concerned for a long time, as we are feverishly working to make CelleCast ready for launch. I can’t talk about it too much right now, but I can say that CelleCast is likely to be the biggest business adventure of my life.

Soon when you visit CelleCast.com or search for audio on demand in Google, you will see a new interface that we hope will mainstream the usage of not just cell phones, but any phone as a new way to access both broadcast and specialized information.

We have been looking very closely at mainstream vs long tail marketing dynamics lately, and all I got to say is that I am glad we are building a media company rather than a tech company. If it were the latter, we would have our heads so far inside the box of the bleeding edge, we would stay stuck within the web 2.0 sub-culture, which although it is very exciting in one sense, it is also a big fat echo chamber with a very thin demographic.

Stay tuned friends

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