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spambayes (was Keeping spamassassin current)

spambayes (was Keeping spamassassin current)

Posted Mar 4, 2004 12:48 UTC (Thu) by metacircles (guest, #8895)
In reply to: Keeping spamassassin current by larsga
Parent article: Keeping spamassassin current

I've also been pretty impressed by spambayes. Since I last cleaned
out my spam folder (six days ago) I've received 8488 spams (about 43Mb), and maybe ten to twenty a day have leaked through it (I don't keep stats on them, I just train and/or delete them as I see them. It feels like about that many)

I have no idea about false positives because I lack any kind of motivation to ever check the spam folder: if people really want to get in touch with me I can only suggest they (a) write mail that looks less like spam, or (b) use a reliable contact method.


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Is my spam filter false positive the sender's problem?

Posted Mar 6, 2004 1:39 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

It's funny that in discussions about email systems, people quite often talk like it's a privilege to send email to them; "it's OK if it's hard to send me an email because the senders who don't play my game don't deserve to reach me."

I guess that's probably true for some recipients, but for most of us, we are probably hurt just as much by a failed email as the sender. I frequently get requests from people for help with software and documents I distribute, and my reply gets rejected because my mail server is erroneously on some black list or a name server isn't set up exactly according to convention, or something like that. And those are just the ones where the spam filter is courteous enough to send a bounce message; there are probably more I don't know about.

It irritates me if I spend 15 minutes writing an email and the recipient never gets it, but the real loser in this case is the recipient. And no, I don't go out of my way to find a way to get through the spam filter in these cases. There's just not enough in it for me.

Is my spam filter false positive the sender's problem?

Posted Mar 10, 2004 1:35 UTC (Wed) by showell (subscriber, #2929) [Link]

An interesting viewpoint but I must state the other side of the coin. In my job e-mail is out-dated but unfortunately not yet out-moded. I get no spam sitting behind a very good corporate firewall but the amount of real mail is so large that I cannot guarentee to read all of it.

I get annoyed with people who consider sending an e-mail as a way of dealing with a subject (ie if I have sent an e-mail then I have fulfilled my responsibility and have informed / handed off responsibility). No-one should consider a sent e-mail as read, even if we had zero spam on the net.

signed
Frustrated Manager

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