I wrote a little thing that connects to my IMAP server (I run my own E-mail), goes through the unread E-mails in the inbox, processes them (process MIME multipart, extract HTML, describe images and links, etc) and feeds them to an LLM with a prompt. The LLM decides if the message is spam or not.
It's amazingly accurate.
The interesting thing is that after experimentation I found that it's best if the prompt doesn't describe what is spam. The LLMs are somewhat "intelligent", so the prompt now describes me — who I am, what I do, my interests, etc. It's much more effective and generalizes better to fight new kinds of spam.
And a nice side observation is that this kind of system requires no training (so I no longer collect samples of spam) and can't be gamed, because it describes me instead of describing specific kinds of spam.
I wrote a little thing that connects to my IMAP server (I run my own E-mail), goes through the unread E-mails in the inbox, processes them (process MIME multipart, extract HTML, describe images and links, etc) and feeds them to an LLM with a prompt. The LLM decides if the message is spam or not.
It's amazingly accurate.
The interesting thing is that after experimentation I found that it's best if the prompt doesn't describe what is spam. The LLMs are somewhat "intelligent", so the prompt now describes me — who I am, what I do, my interests, etc. It's much more effective and generalizes better to fight new kinds of spam.
And a nice side observation is that this kind of system requires no training (so I no longer collect samples of spam) and can't be gamed, because it describes me instead of describing specific kinds of spam.
I have to write it up in a blog post.