I’ve just gone through a boatload of “pseudo”-spam. Pseudo-spam is what I call legitimate e-mail that, when using a vanilla installation of Spamassassin, is marked as spam solely through the e-mail creator’s carelessness, thoughtlessness, whatever adjective you want to use (I refrained from using stupidity although I desperately wanted to). This morning, 25% of the number of e-mails that were classified as spam were actually legitimate. After analyzing the Spamassassin rules that were triggered, many rules were needlessly fired.

I loathe HTML email for many reasons. Privacy and security are two. A Google search for “html email security” returned about 328,000,000 results and “html email privacy” returned about 2,010,000,000 results. That’s billions, folks. For me, it’s one of those “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” things. I just analyzed a corpus of 4267 messages, a mixture of personal and marketing, looking for image references. One message contained 343 references to images.