hatched a crazy scheme this past weekend that i thought would fix the critical failure of DOOM! last thursday — namely, we’re supposed to quarantine mail messages over 90% likely to be spam, which works fine, but the problem is that we use a fuzzy-matching system such that you can basically invent email addresses for an individual, and you can’t quarantine a message under a non-canonical mailing address or they’ll never be able to access it. we were hacking this by using a gigantic map to verify if an address was canonical, and two layers of miltering to catch pre- and post-canonicalization, but it takes a lot of go-juice to check an 87,000 line flat file multiple times per email message. have spent all week trying to get the crazy scheme to work, including drafting a coworker to hack some of his code and help me, … only to realize today that it won’t fucking solve the problem at all, it only works for anyone who doesn’t forward their mail.
and it was so good! it would have eliminated so much processing overhead, it would have been so slick! i almost cried when i realized it wouldn’t work, and then went to david and he confirmed that yeah, it won’t solve the problem. i can’t believe i didn’t see that earlier, before i spent so much time working on setting up a prototype. am so angry with myself. so now david and i have come up with about half a dozen more schemes trying to get this to work, and they’re all — frankly — fucking nuts. anything we do to make this work is going to make things even more complex. i fucking hate ph. i wish we’d killed it a thousand years ago and didn’t have to deal with this it’s-an-email-address-that-isn’t-actually-an-email-address shit. life would be so much better if each individual had only one fucking address! am so frustrated. this project is hellish.