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defund12 / defund12.org

defund12.org
https://defund12.org/
MIT License
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Procedural generation of adjectives in order to create unique emails #1447

Open tgavent opened 4 years ago

tgavent commented 4 years ago

Feature request

As our numbers grow and defund12 users flood the inboxes of politicians and representatives, sending emails with identical word choice could put us at risk for being labeled bots or spam. We need to make sure they know that we are NOT BOTS, each and every one of us has a voice that deserves to be heard. In order to prevent our emails being thrown in the spam folder, I suggest we attempt to personalize the emails, or at least make them unique.

I have seen suggestions for a "mad libs" approach, which I am fond of, but also want to suggest a procedurally generated approach that randomly chooses a word from an array of synonyms to create a unique email. This would assume the current emails as a skeletons, then marks certain words as mutable with a tag of some sort to indicate the mood of the word. When the email is put together, these tagged words would take a random string from an array associated with the tagged mood. For example...

"I am ['disgusted', 'appalled', 'sickened' ...] by the ["brutality", "unprofessionalism", "incompetence" ... ] of the police force"

This can go in conjunction with the mid lib approach via a randomize button for those who do not want to fill out each individual field

teddywilson commented 4 years ago

this sounds great. how would we define this in the data model? "data model" being the markdown files in _emails/us/.... Would it just be a direct string replacement? Would it be an array that's actually defined in the body text? We would have to make sure, whatever format we end up using, that it's safe and reliable. Curious to hear other people's thoughts on what a design might actually look like.

NickCrews commented 4 years ago

I would caution that we should do some research to ensure that this actually works to beat spam filters. I feel like most spam filters are smarter than this, this would be a pretty basic thing they would check for. IDK how to do that, maybe some basic background reading? I imagine no one is going to tell you "oh yeah this is how our filter works so now you can reverse-engineer it". Perhaps some basic testing, a script to send a test gmail account 1000s of emails, all with slightly different wording?

teddywilson commented 4 years ago

I actually tend to disagree. Email filtering is not actually super advanced, and I wonder how advanced council members filtering really is. If they are using a "contains text" filter, then this would surely beat that, no? @NickCrews

NickCrews commented 4 years ago

I think it's just a spectrum of where we all fall on the optimism spectrum. I'm of the camp "assume that this won't work until we get some evidence that it does work." I'm not looking for a ton, just at least some proof that were not wasting our time.