Spammers know my email address, but none of them seem to know my first and last name. I'm sure it's not as easy for them to get a person's first and last name as it is to get the email address. Perhaps a very good way to reduce some of the false positives in spam filtering tools is to look for your own name. Perhaps a good way to reduce the chance that your own message will not trigger a false positive is to use the recipient's personal name. A good rule might be to look for the personal name on the first non-blank line of the message, as well as in the To or CC header fields.
Posted by Doug Sauder at February 11, 2003 07:29 AM