Hooray for keyword-based filters. Subtle as a flying mallet.

Surely she should be keeping her nose out of this? Sounds to me to be purely an IT operations issue where a request could be made through the Public Service – does it really need some ex government reject to throw their weight around to try and make themselves feel relevant.

Seriously doesnt sound like the kind of thing that warrants press coverage or any ministers attention, regardless of whether they are government or opposition – how much is she being paid to spearhead IT issues in the media?

The IT systems at MSD are (or were) incredibly locked down, and stuck in a 90s timewarp… oh how I miss you 1996 edition of Mozilla Mail!

Any post containing the words “Socialist”, “Socialism”, “Pinkos” gets ignored.

So far, so good

An old one but a good one from Dick Emery on ‘filters’!

Well worth watching.

Having said that… Way back in 2001 or so I did experiment with using the simple keyword filtering options in my employer’s mail gateway software to see if we could filter the tiny amount of spam we were receiving then. I ditched the whole idea after about two days. One of the things that convinced me it wasn’t a viable approach was that we blocked an e-mail from the World Bank who did legitimately want to give “millions” of “dollars” to “Nigeria”. You think you’ve devised a perfect three point filter for a scammer’s begging letter, and an international organisation triggers it.