[Air-l] what is spam

[David Palfreyman]

Our institution has recently started using Maia Mailguard, which is
doing a fine job of recognizing large amounts of incoming spam messages.
 It also gives me the opportunity to see the rules which it is using to
decide what is spam, and I've just noticed that one of the ten rules it
used to classify an instance of the Nigerian advance fee fraud mail as
spam was that the mail "Contains 'Dear (something)'".  Interesting that
it is so rare for an email to begin with "Dear..." that it is now
considered a *suspect* beginning for a message.

:-D