Re: [Asrg] Adding a spam button to MUAs

Martijn Grooten <martijn.grooten@virusbtn.com> Fri, 29 January 2010 12:37 UTC

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From: Martijn Grooten <martijn.grooten@virusbtn.com>
To: Anti-Spam Research Group - IRTF <asrg@irtf.org>
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:37:33 +0000
Thread-Topic: [Asrg] Adding a spam button to MUAs
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Subject: Re: [Asrg] Adding a spam button to MUAs
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Chris Lewis wrote:
> Frankly, I think the vast majority of people who thing TiS are bad are
> either people who have an incentive to consider them bad, or are
> largely
> unaware of how they're actually used, or are expecting some sort of
> one-to-one reaction/theoretical purity to every TiS hit.
>
> Score 'em statistically.  Whitelist when they goof.  Humans make
> mistakes.  And sometimes they're right when the filters aren't.  Design
> for it, including methods to intervene when necessary.  No big deal.

Out of curiosity, have your users been instructed on how to use the TiS buttons (and to use them in the first place, instead of just clicking delete) or do you just trust them to do the right thing (most of the time)? And do you think it would scale to larger, more anonymous organizations such as ISPs?

Unrelated to that, if most MUAs got a TiS-button, wouldn't this allow spammers/botherders to effectively DDOS the systems that process the feedback, thus making them (temporarily) useless? I could see why spammers would see an advantage in doing that.

Martijn.

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