I get no spam.

That’s not 100% accurate, but it’s pretty close. Ever since I started using Bogofilter, the amout of spam I get is as close to zero as makes no odds. A little over a year now, and I think I’ve received two spam messages in my inbox. I do, however, get a slightly higher number of false positives. These are generally still unsolicited emails, but may or may not be something I actually want to look at. Bogofilter would normally flag these as “unsure,” but I turned off the unsuredness feature so that emails are straight black and white, spam or not spam. That eases my training a bit, and I don’t think it hurts the filtering all that much (on the contrary, I think it helps it in my situation). The only trade off is I still have to check my spam folder for false positives every so often, but I’ve set a threshold on it so only the stuff that’s really close to being legit is placed in there. Everything else gets shit-canned.

Which leads me to my post. I noticed a message in there this morning that seemed to come from the Royal Bank. Yeah, yeah. A banking e-mail. I know. Probably spam.

And it was. The interesting bit was not so much how official it looked or asked me to click on a link (that went off to some Italian server somewhere), no. The interesting bit was this:

We’d like to thank you in person for your loyalty – and take some time to get to know you better. Just stop by any Royal Bank of Canada branch or RBC Banks location on Thursday, May 31th for coffee and cake and help us celebrate Customer Appreciation Day.

I wonder how many people are going to fall for that. Clever… not good, but clever.