I gave up last week and enabled “Spam Assassin” on my email server. Then I switched to Mozilla Thunderbird which has built in spam filtering on Tuesday.

I was chatting with some people during the float trip over Memorial Day Weekend and the phrase “bayesian filtering” came up. This is basically what Spam Assassin and Thunderbird both do – spam filters that learn as you mark emails as spam or not spam.

So imagine my surprise when I get a piece of spam with the subject “bayesian cellophane continent.”

Edit: 2018 – “I’ve always been a closet Bayesian myself.” J. Antel