Re: [Endymail] where's the end, was spam versus cleartext

[Watson Ladd <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 11:07 AM, John R Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> So what's wrong with the phone not seeing all mail, because it might
>> be spam? 90% of the emails I get come from few sending sites, who I
>> know don't spam.
>
>
> I see you're a gmail user.  You have no idea how much spam Gmail is
> rejecting or discarding before it ever gets anywhere near your inbox.

It doesn't matter how much spam is rejected overall: what matters is
how much ham is rejected, and how early the spam can be rejected, and,
in the case of the phone, how much more tightly we can draw the
filtering compared to a desktop machine. Much of the spam in the spam
folder doesn't have SPF or DKIM indications, or comes from such
venerable institutions as winning.net. Even if the content was
encrypted, it would be possible to filter a significant amount of spam
through these indications.

This can be easily quantified in the case of naive Bayesian
classifiers, by looking at the entropy gain of each signal, and doing
the usual sort of threshold picking analysis.

>
>> Furthermore, emails are small
>
>
> Yours may be.  I see megabyte spams all the time in my spam folder.

And I don't see megabyte emails in my inbox that I want to read. I
guess my phone can ignore all of those then.

>
>> Furthermore, a laptop absolutely can grab a bunch of messages and
>> filter them: the fact that it isn't on all the time doesn't make it
>> unable to do this.
>
>
> The whole point of having a mail client on my phone is that I can check my
> mail when my laptop is turned off.

Do you care if you receive a message from someone who may be a spammer
a bit late, compared to a message from someone you email back and
forth regularly? Email is not reliable.

>
> As a general rule, whatever your or my mail flow may be, it's not typical of
> everyone's, and a design that appears to work for one of us is likely not to
> work in general.

Sure, but the question is "how much won't it work"?

>
> Regards,
> John Levine, [e-mail], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail.



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