“Why is my inbox full of spam, while I still can’t get the mail I send into the inbox reliably?” — most email marketers at some point in their career.
Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open — you had to swing a latch, align two bits of handle, that sort of thing. But it turns out it’s actually quite tricky to get the design of these cans just right. Make it too complex and people can’t get them open to put away their garbage in the first place.
Said one park ranger, “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
Spam filter developers have a similar problem. Just as bears learn how to solve mechanical puzzles to get into the trash, spammers learn to send email that’s technically clean and has plausible looking content. And many of them learn to do this faster and better than legitimate email marketers do, as the rush by legitimate senders to get Yahoogle compliance in place has shown.
There is considerable overlap between how spammy email streams appear between the upper quartile of spammers and the lower quartile of legitimate email marketers.
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Smarter than the average bear is indeed a compliment – as always, you have given us new insight into the complexity of email management!
“ There is considerable overlap between how spammy email streams appear between the upper quartile of spammers and the lower quartile of legitimate email marketers.”
Our daily struggle. Great example (and read).