Is my spam filter false positive the sender's problem? [LWN.net]

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

Posted Mar 6, 2004 1:39 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: spambayes (was Keeping spamassassin current) by metacircles
Parent article: Keeping spamassassin current

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.

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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