Trying to help my mom get some benefit from Internet/Web without all of the bad stuff and headaches, I’ve come up with a product idea: an email system in which marketing and mailing list messages are all automatically deleted by default. There can be a separate page in which the senior him/her/zir/theirself or a young relative can click “yes, do let in a flood of emails from Source X”. It is easy to sign up to email lists, e.g., if a senior does any shopping online or participates in social media, and hard to quit (buried in the fine print). So build an email system from scratch or add this behavior into AOL, Gmail, or some other webmail system.
My mom got to the point with her AOL account that she could never find relevant emails because they were buried in a tide of mailing list crud.
I recognize that Google deals with this already to some extent by having separate tabs for Promotions and Social, but it’s not quite as big a hammer as I’m suggesting.
Readers: What do you think of the idea?
With my mom, I added her gmail account to my account so that when I am in gmail I can easily switch between my account and her account and keep an eye on things. Regarding your earlier post on trying to get a mobile phone number for setting up an Alexa type device, I ended up using a ring camera where I could randomly “check in” – I had the benefit of the video and audio feed and my mom would just hear the audio through the ring camera. I suppose you could do the same with a smart doorbell device where you could mount the doorbell inside and when she pushed the button your phone would ring and you could talk to her.
Well, with GenAI it might start to become technically possible. You can run the LLaMa2-7B model on a moderately specced laptop nowadays with llama.cpp. But spam is an adversarial problem where the spammers will adapt faster than new models can be trained.
A bigger problem is that with age and cognitive decline they also get more gullible and more likely to click on lists or sign up for them. I tried many times, to no avail, to explain to my own mother the basics of epistemology 101 applied to spam, e.g. how do you know this guy who claims to be one of the foremost experts on nutrition is who claims? But he says it on his email! (facepalm)
I’m afraid email spam is a lost cause, as is any system that does free and frictionless communications without a surety bond toi deter spammers.
Over the last 25 years of auto spam filtering, the auto filter has grown to take out everyone who needs money, but lions really do want to work for free for 40 years for a chance to get rich.
Why not just make a whitelist? How many sources of email sent by unanticipated senders does she receive?