Inauthentic Email Spam - Intent & Context
Do you know how to get me to never buy anything from you?
Send me messages trying to deceive me into thinking we already have a relationship--or you have one with someone in my company.
And you ALL know what I am talking about. Anyone in any position of leadership is bombarded by this fakery. These people lack integrity.
The ones that irk me the most are the ones that send calendar invites to meetings we never agreed to. And then send messages as if I've missed the meeting, etc. I have two words for you--and pardon me LinkedIn--but fuck off.
Another are the ones that make you feel like this is a real personal message:
- Re: Huge fan Steve
- Steve Benfield !!!
- Steve--missed your call
Or the ones that try to make you feel guilty for not responding.
- I was disappointed I'd didn't hear from you
- We're going to have to give your slot away
- You made me look bad to my boss and I got fired
Ok..that last one might be made up--but it would definitely get my attention.
Every minute of my time you waste with your inauthentic manipulative messaging is time and attention stolen from me.
Now obviously these techniques work. The cost is so low that its easy to just set up a campaign/workflow to spew these things out. And they get through spam filters because the content sounds just like any other normal email. Its genius really. But its coercive and its an invasion of my time and trust.
What might be helpful is an email client that had a section that only showed messages from people in your contact list or who you've interacted with before (replying for example). And then a tab with new incoming messages not marked Spam. gmail does a decent job separating promotions, etc. But I need that extra tab to delineate the people that are IN and the people that want to GET IN.
In fact, put the 'GET IN' bucket into two sections. One where the person was copied on an email I've gotten before, or perhaps whose company is mentioned in other emails. So if a coworker says 'Hey Jane Doe is going to reach out' -- then when Jane Doe does reach out--it comes to the top of the list.
I think if we combined Intent Detection with Document/Email Context Analysis, it might help here.
Intent Detection is trying to determine intent in a message. I want a meeting, want to do a demo, ask you a question, inform you, etc. And there is a lot of work in this area as you would expect:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/05/Wang_SIGIR19.pdf
https://paperswithcode.com/task/intent-detection/codeless
I think if you later this with some context awareness of the other emails or even documents you've generated. What if you took notes in your notes app and in it you wrote about some company you were going to partner with. Well when someone in that company emails you, then the algo could rank those incoming new emails higher in the 'GET IN' tab of your email client.