AOL Falls In Love With The Wrong Spam Stats — Says Spam Decreased
from the no,-just-the-complaints... dept
AOL is claiming that their new spam filter has greatly reduced spam, creating nice looking headlines about less spam. Of course, you could question their findings. The details show that what was reduced was spam complaints. This might be a proxy for the amount of spam that got through to inboxes, or it might just show that AOL subscribers have wised up and realized that reporting spam to AOL doesn’t seem to do a bit of good — and they’ve just given up on it.
Comments on “AOL Falls In Love With The Wrong Spam Stats — Says Spam Decreased”
AOL Spam Filters
Actually, I think you mentioned the member reports out of context, Mike. While the story you linked to did say that member complaints had fallen, you missed or neglected to mention these:
So, if you believe those figures, AOL actually seems to have seen a decrease in spam. There are some possible spins:
Having some inkling of spammers, that doesn’t seem very likely.
However, if that were the case, I’d think complaints would have stayed the same or gone up.
So, while I won’t discard the statistics, I do agree they seem to need more supporting information.
Forgot One
I forgot one spin — AOL’s subscriber based has dropped enough that AOL sees less spam.