Geodog

Email is dying, or Your resume has been marked as SPAM

Today I ran across an entry on Dave Sifry's weblog that noted that Technorati was hiring. I went to Technorati's job page and found a job that looks like it was made for me, as good as the dream job that got away from me a year ago. Excitedly, I sat down and wrote up a cover letter, pointing out all the ways in which I would be a perfect fit for the job (and thinking about how much fun it would be).

At the end, I debated how to include my resume. If Dave is processing applicants through a recruiter, they probably want resumes in Microsoft Word, which seems to be the only format that most recruiters can deal with, for reasons unknown to me. On the other hand, Dave is a longtime Linux geek. I remember that I've exchanged emails with him in the past. I check my email archive -- aha, my last email from him was written using Ximian Evolution 1.4. Better include my resume inline as ASCII as well, with a link to the online version of my resume, I think.

So I send off my resume and cover letter and happily turn to other tasks. Half an hour later I check email, and do my usual quick scan through my junkmail folder. What do I spot but the cc'd copy of my cover letter and resume. I just started testing a new version of the Spamnix spam filter that added Bayesian filtering. Spamnix is a Eudora plug-in based on Spam Assassin. It decided that the email and resume that I sent to Dave was SPAM:

SPAM: ------------------------ Spamnix Spam Report -------------------------
SPAM: Spamnix identified this message as spam.  This report shows which
SPAM: rules matched the message and how many points each rule contributed.
SPAM: 
SPAM: Content analysis details:   (5.4 hits, 5.0 required)
SPAM:  5.4 BAYES_99               BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 99 to 100%

Apparently words like Standards, Marketing, System, Proven, Global, Experience, President, Technologies, Product, Project, Manager, Director, Startups, and Software, which appear in my resume, are also common in the spam I receive. To some degree this makes sense -- resumes and cover letters, like spam, are a form of self-promotion. This is probably one of the reasons that I find job hunting painful, since I was trained to be modest about my accomplishments, and am shy by nature. But it creates a real problem. I can always find a less zealous spam filter, but what about Dave and all the other people I have sent resumes to since I started job hunting again at the beginning of this year? What if their spam filters have been junking my resumes? While that might explain the low response rate, it is a scary thought, and another sign that the volume of spam, and the endless game of spam hide and seek, are breaking email. How can I be sure that my email is reaching the person it is destined for? Should I tone down my resume? Use intentional misspellings in it? In Dave's case, I can go see his talk next week and chat with him personally, but how about all the other resumes I sent out in January? Should I start snail mailing resumes to internet companies?

When I started using email in the 80's, it might take 3 days for the person to get your email, but one could be reasonably confident that if you didn't get a bounce message, it had been delivered (and there were also the cheesy Return Receipts). Now, there is no assurance that your email has been delivered, just a reasonable probability that if you didn't use too many spam words, it probably got delivered to the inbox of the intended user. Probably (I wonder how Pfizer communicates with its salespeople in the field about its best-selling product).

I don't have any brilliant new suggestions on how to combat the flood of spam. I've followed the debates on Politech and IP about whether it is possible to combat it with technological or legal means. I do believe that the longer this flood is allowed to increase exponentially, the more support there will be for draconian technological and legal solutions, and the less likely that email will be a free and easy medium of communication. And we will all be poorer if that happens.