Allegedly, on or about 29 December 2013, Dave Ihnat sent: > It sounds to me like you don't care for anti-spam solutions, and as > such have never really investigated the viable options. I can > understand your sentiments, but don't agree with your conclusions. > It's your choice, and I respect that. To summarise, and not drag this out more than it needs... I've tried the uncontrollable anti-spam options offered by various mail hosts (ISPs, Hotmail, et cetera). They get false positives that I can't really do anything about, I can't accept that, at all. They get many false negatives that make it just pointless to let them sort mail for me. For remote filtering, you need to be able to control it (set your own thresholds, rules and parameters), it needs a user interface. You also need to be able to train it with spam/ham, and you can't really do that with POP services, you need something like IMAP. Many don't offer it. I've tried bayesian filtering. You spend forever training it, it never ends, and you still get false positives and negatives. I tried to speed up the training, by giving the server access to a year's worth of stored spam and ham, but it only partially helped. I've tried spam assassin. But, again, you need to constantly tweak it. Granted, it got better at getting rule updates with things like your regular "yum update," but it still needed manual tweaking to improve it. And the false positives were untenable. False negatives are a nuisance, but false positives can lose you work. If I don't see an email asking me about doing a job, I'm not going to get that work. In the end, after about a dozen years, no maybe I've been doing the public internet since about 1997, I can't really remember, so it's a bit longer, I've come to these conclusions: Most of my spam came from my address being harvested from mailing lists like this one (normal types of mailing lists, nothing weird that you'd expect trouble from, and not ones full of flaming debates). Next down the list was my addresses being harvested from PGP key servers. Amusingly, or disturbingly, I could start or stop being sent spam by adding or removing email addresses from the key. And about two days later the change would occur. It took me a while to notice that, because I hadn't updated the key in ages, then did it two or three times in a short period, saw the change, did some more deliberate tests and confirmed it. I got a small amount of spam from my address being harvested from my website. That was easily fixed, and without any captchas or JavaScripting nonsense, both things that don't work for some browsers. Lastly, I'd get maybe one spam every couple of months from some business that I'd done business with via email. I had my original email address until about a couple of years ago, I got the hotmail and yahoo ones about one year after my first address. So I've had a long time to assess this. I pretty much ignore hotmail, I only have the address to chat with friends over MSN, it's spam filtering is awful. Even when you set it to only allow mail from your contact list, it'd still get random spam. Yahoo's was used for pretty much the same reason (instant messaging account), then I started using it, instead, for participating in several computing oriented mailing lists, since they were hosted by Yahoo. As Yahoo has improved whatever they've done over the years, and those lists were subscriber only, I've seen the spam content wax and wane, over a long time. But it's about one a day, on average, now. When I joined this list, several years back, I thought I didn't want to have another spam managing issue, and I had no desire for private mail from strangers, so I subscribed with a self-deleting, mailbox. I don't have to do anything to manage mail, other than press delete on a few extra messages each session, that came from a different account. I don't have to do anything to manage an anti-spam system. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64 All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the public lists. George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
