Re: [Asrg] Adding a spam button to MUAs

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> Wed, 16 December 2009 14:55 UTC

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Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:55:33 -0000
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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
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Subject: Re: [Asrg] Adding a spam button to MUAs
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In article <20091216120742.GA28622@gsp.org> you write:
>On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 05:50:24PM -0800, Steve Atkins wrote:
>> > I think allowing end users access to such a button is a terrible idea.
>> 
>> Data from actual reality contradicts your (otherwise plausible) reasoning.
>
>Not my data.  I have a rather large collection of incidents involving
>message recipients who have marked as spam:

Unless your collection is at least tens of millions of messages, I don't
think it counts as large.

More to the point, your collection has severe sample bias.  If you're
looking at incoming reports on a network that doesn't have bulk
senders and doesn't have a lot of consumer PCs that get botted, you're
not going to see many real complaints.  On my tiny network, 100% of
the feedback reports are either about COI lists to which the recipient
subscribed, or personal mail, since that's all it sends.  The reports
are still useful, both to prune out subscribers who aren't interested
any more, and these days, to identify spam sent from freemail accounts
that have gotten phished to lists to which the accounts are subscribed.

Large networks find user spam reports very useful, both on the reporting
network to tune their own sender reputation data, and on the receiving
networks to identify misbehaving senders.  This is reality, Steve and
I talk to people who manage the networks and this is what they tell us.

R's,
John