Using Spam Blockers To Target HIV, Too

摘要

Cut-rate painkillers! Unclaimed riches in Nigeria! ! Most of us quickly identify such e-mail messages as spam. But how would you teach that skill to a machine? David Heckerman needed to know. Early this decade, Heckerman was leading a spam blocking team at Microsoft Research. To build their tool, team members meticulously mapped out thousands of signals that a message might be junk. An e-mail featuring "Viagra," for example, was a good bet to be spam—but things got complicated in a hurry.