My ISP recently started using www.spamalert.net to filter my e-mail (I hadn't asked them to) and as an upshot of this, many newsletters that I normally get haven't been coming through. The "spam alert instead sends me an e-mail(!) describing the intercepted missive , at which point you can reply to the e-mail that you want to receive said e-mail message, or ignore it and it will supress that sender afterwards. Seems like a lot of bother to me. What's also interesting is that the spam alert also rates your alleged spam, on a spam scale, which seems to go from zero to a hundred in likelyhood that your e-mail is indeed spam.

My bulletins from The Nation get a score of twenty, whereas the one from Common Cause is apparently a tad peskier, meriting a 22. I get e-mail from the Gephardt campaign, which gets a 37, and from Kerry, who is slightly spammier at 40. I'm tempted to get on all the dem candidates e-mail lists to see how the software rates them, but I also want to tell myself I have better things to do, even though I don't.