Operation Spamalot

Praise to a governmental agency? Could it be? Yes, and an initiative with a funny name too!

S.E.C. Moves Against Spam That Pushes Hot Stocks - New York Times

The Securities and Exchange Commission has taken a step toward combating stock spam, the unsolicited bulk e-mail message that promotes cheap stocks for quick profits, which usually prove illusory.

Starting an enforcement effort it is calling Operation Spamalot, the S.E.C. suspended trading in 35 stocks that had been promoted in recent spam campaigns. The suspensions will last for 10 days. The S.E.C. said that further investigation could lead to arrests.

Spam over all has swelled during the last six months, and now accounts for more than 90 percent of all e-mail messages

Stock spam is a small percentage of the daily spam I get, but still, any reduction in spam is good.

Since you asked, 5,965 messages (65%) last month and 47,622 messages (58%) last year were identified as spam by Eudora Pro's Bayesian filter. Yes, I do get a lot of email (from mailing lists, news searches, friends and enemies, alerts from my bank, newsletters, email reminders from myself, comments from my blog); according to Eudora, I received 81,983 messages last year. No way I read them all: many get sorted into an email folder, and archived, unread. Many, I just read the title before deleting. Every personal email gets read, as do comments to my blog, but not all get responded to. There just isn't sufficient time in a day.

Bayesian email filters take advantage of Bayes's theorem. Bayes's theorem, in the context of spam, says that the probability that an email is spam, given that it has certain words in it, is equal to the probability of finding those certain words in spam email, times the probability that any email is spam, divided by the probability of finding those words in any email

works pretty well, with some notable exceptions (Bayesian poisoning, for instance)

Tags: SEC, /spam