What's my personal spam threshold (PeST)? Towards spam filtering as interactive experience

Utilizing interactive visualizations of data sets as a way of helping users explore and understand complex relationships in data has a long tradition in Human Computer Interaction, dating back at least to dynamic queries and starfield displays developed in the early Nineties. In this paper we discuss how interactive visualizations can be used to help non-expert users understand how different spam filter settings impact on what they will see in their email inboxes. The key idea is that users can visually explore the positive or negative effects of different filter settings on their email inboxes without having to know the details of how respective filtering modules work in detail. Lab-based evaluation of two prototypes suggests the approach led to an increase in the knowledge about spam filtering even among subjects possessing prior spam filtering knowledge. The work contributes to the small but growing body of work on user interaction with spam filters which is scarce even though spam filtering has become truly ubiquitous.