Re: thoughts on spam

[Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net>]

* "Jason R. Mastaler" <jason-dated-1005548417.48bbb7@mastaler.com>  on Sun, 04 Nov 2001
| As far as false positives, I've not had yet (in over 6 months) had one,
| and I'm sure any TMDA will tell you the same.  Unnecessary complexity is
| what gets you into trouble in that area.  TMDA's methodology is very
| simple, which I think is its greatest strength.

TDMA and puts the onus on the sender.  I think this is bad because for
every "power user" like me there are hundreds if not thousands who are
utterly confused when they get a warning, "unable to deliver, will try
again in N hours" and want to know if their mail was delivered.  These
people Just Don't Get It, and they -never- will.  These are the people who
will generate false positives against TDMA.  They will be confused by
TDMA's "do this to get on my whitelist" response because it is not the
nothingness they expect, and most of them will simply ignore it and never
send you anything again.

And then there are those like me.  If I am in a pissy mood and I get
something like that from TDMA, I could very well say "fuck that," delete
it, and killfile you so that I never have to deal with a fundamentally
brain-damaged mail system.

The RISK here is that you will never know that this has happened.  Your
idea of "no way my whitelist will ever generate a false positive" seems to
me to be woefully vulnerable to false positives without any feedback.  That
seems to me to be a bad system, and I am one of the most rabidly anti-spam
people I know.  If the choice is between a little bit of spam getting past
spambouncer and losing legitimate mail, I will take the spam, let Gnus drop
it into my spambucket, and run it through SpamCop manually.

SpamCop is abandoning their whitelist/blacklist system because the
whitelist system does not work well for everyone, and the blacklist system
has proven not to scale up to the load being placed on it.  Their new
heuristic system works because they have -the- largest database of spam and
spammers in the world from which to derive them, and that database is
constantly being updated.
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