David Madore's WebLog: Quasi-spam alert!

Spam is one thing: it isn't all that hard to get rid of—accumulating two or three spam filters, in my case SpamAssassin and SpamProbe successively, more or less does the trick, even in really bad cases like my own. But what about quasi-spam? By this I mean thinks like “newsletters” (to which I've never subscribed, of course, but which aren't complete junk either), or targetted email advertising. The typical example is Amazon.com sending me reading suggestions or special offers or whatever: things I really don't care about, thank you, but if I train my spam filters to recognize this as spam, I'm afraid they'll soon treat every email sent by Amazon.com as spam. I similarly receive quasi-spam from lots of other channels, including supposedly reputable ones such as the Franco-German cultural TV channel Arte or recently the Monnaie de Paris. And, of course, many emails I receive throught my lab could also count as quasi-spam. I'm getting annoyed with all of it!