At 10:38 AM -0500 3/8/03, Chris Lewis wrote:
The hugely critical thing is how you handle false positives. Do you
just sigh, and say "blacklists are STUPID!!!" and turn them off, or do
you take a broader view and get the open proxy fixed? It's not as if a
given FP is something you can't do something about.
I used to spend time tracking down that kind of thing. The volume
exceeded what I could deal with years ago. But more critically, now
that I'm running a service, I simply cannot afford it. Do the math
on what someone pays to have their email spam-free, and then compare
that to the amount of time it takes to track down and complain about
proxies. No can do. I'd far rather spend my time here trying to fix
the problem for once and for all than run around sticking my fingers
in dikes. You can afford to do it for two reasons. One, you're
relatively large. Two, your salary isn't being paid *just* by spam
filtering income--you're subsidized.
A FP or two? So what? If you're doing it right, the worst that happens
is that the email is delayed a bit.
This is a common misconception. "False positives aren't a problem,
they just go into a queue that people can check." Technically, it's
true. Practically, it doesn't work.
I've got bad news for you. People don't check the queues. Oh sure,
our technical users do. They understand fuzzy matching, they know
that this kind of technology isn't 100% reliable. Our non-technical
users don't, and furthermore, when they do look at them, they delete
them without scanning them all. The longer they use the system, the
less carefully they check. And the problem gets worse. The better
your filtering gets, the less likely the user is to scan the queue.
In other words, the lower the false positive rate, the more likely
the end user is to delete the false positive without seeing it.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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