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lost email
May 23, 2007 ( geek )
BTW - if you've sent me email this past week and I didn't respond, I might not have gotten it. An awesome script I wrote back in Jamaica that read an SMS and replied with bus directions got caught in an infinite, exponentially expanding loop[1] which drug the mail server to a grinding halt. At the same time, my learning (bayesian) spam filter's database grew to an unusable size, and the clean-up method corrupted it, causing me to receive all the spam from all my accounts, which is a deluge of viagra and bank fraud schemes. Cleaning that up and re-training my spam filter have meant some lost email. In geek talk, we call this "fun"
[1] The script reads a mail and tries to extract bus numbers, street names, or points of interest from it, then sends it back in up to 3 messages (cut up to avoid the limitations of SMS). It for whatever reason sent one of these to itself, resulting in 3 messages with street/bus/POI information, each of these 3 spawned 3 more, and so on. Bad.
Posted by griffjon at May 23, 2007 08:30 PM
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