Re: Hashing spam

Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxx> · Thu, 18 Dec 2003 15:39:58 -0500

The problem with this analysis is that it assigns greater value to 
contributions from subscribers than to contributions from 
non-subscribers.  But often the failure to accept clues from 
"outsiders" causes working groups to do harm - and filtering messages 
in the #2 category increases this tendency.  The occasional rejection 
of #2 messages can be very harmful.

On Dec 18, 2003, at 3:01 PM, Vernon Schryver wrote:

  1. on-topic messages from subscribers
  2. on-topic messages from non-subscribers
  3. noise from subscribers
  4. noise from non-subscribers
  5. pure spam such as advertisements for loan sharks

In this list, only #1 is clearly "good." It is good to avoid rejecting

#2, but there is surely no harm in sometimes delaying #2.  If the

senders of any rejected or "false positive" #2 received an informative

non-delivery report so that they could retransmit, what would be the 
harm?

SpamAssassin is reported to be better than 60% accurate.  #2 is surely
rare compared to #1.  Thus, as long as SpamAssassin white-lists all
subscribers, there would be no harm in the occasional rejection of #2.