Re: False positives (was Re: [Asrg] Re: RMX Records)

Kee Hinckley <nazgul@somewhere.com> Wed, 05 March 2003 03:05 UTC

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To: "David F. Skoll" <dfs@roaringpenguin.com>
From: Kee Hinckley <nazgul@somewhere.com>
Subject: Re: False positives (was Re: [Asrg] Re: RMX Records)
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Date: Tue, 04 Mar 2003 22:05:04 -0500

At 9:46 PM -0500 3/4/03, David F. Skoll wrote:
>  >   If my ISP is under serious attack from spammers, then some level of
>>  "good" mail will probably be thrown out with the spam.  The only way I
>>  know of to guarantee that no "good" mail is thrown out, is to not
>>  throw out *any* mail.
>
>Or to have a human sort it out.

It's not clear to me that human sorting would be reliable to the 
extent you are implying.  Especially third party human sorting.  But 
I've come real close to replying to some messages that looked 
perfectly fine to me.  The information that flagged them as spam was 
not the content, but details about the path they took, how many 
people they went to, and other things that a human observer could not 
determine.  But in any case, it's not clear what this means in an ISP 
context.  Companies may find it necessary to hire a human to filter 
borderline messages that an automatic filter is unsure of, but in the 
ISP context, false positives do not have a simple 
solution--especially since an ISP is not likely to be able to afford 
(in terms of processing time and resources) the degree of end-user 
customization that an enterprise might (and I seriously doubt any of 
us want ISPs reading our email).
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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