On 17 May 2002, at 10:00, Mike Avery wrote:
> Moreover, you don't have to block the email. You can
> send it to the intended recipient with text added to the
> subject line. Something like, "*** SPAM SUSPECT ***,
> which allows the recipient to deal with it.
We tried that and found it wholly unacceptable --- basically, every false
positive involves, in essence, trashing a legitimate message. [consider
doing a 'reply' to such a message.. it'll be a constant pain that you
have to remember to edit the subject line]. We currently have our filter
set up to add an additional header line, basically something like:
X-this-looks-like-spam: WHY
where the 'WHY' is whatever triggered the detection [so that users that
have trouble with particular heuristics can 'tune' which 'WHY's they like
and which they choose to ignore]. BUT -- we then discovered that OE
[that cursed piece of crap] cannot filter on anything but the 'normal'
headers... After a lot of screwing around, we eventually decided that
putting a comment after the 'To' address was about the least obtrusive,
but still-OE-filterable, place to put the spam-notice [we also still add
the X-header for folk with non-crippled mail clients, of course].
>.. Some people don't mind missing some legitimate
> emails as well.
I was *astounded* to learn this. I get regular bounces from world,
thanks to their dumb, overaggressive filtering system, and when I
informed the on-world listmembers that they were losing about 5% of the
contributions to the list (and presumably also lord-only-knows how much
other email) they just said they don't care. For my part, the moment I
learned that world was "helping me" [sic] by blocking some of my incoming
email, I was *out*of*there*...
I wonder how many folk really DO have that attitude [that is, not caring
if some percentage of their incoming email is just trashed and vanishes].
Just think how easy it would be: you could cut spam in half for those
folk just by discarding half of their incoming email at random, sight
unseen...:o) What's scary is that they might think that's OK and only
complain that it didn't bag ALL of their spam... [at which point, you
just dump ALL of their incoming email and make them happy campers..:o)]
/Bernie\
--
Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA
--> Too many people, too few sheep <--
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