Re: [Asrg] Lets Fix Mailing Lists

On Mon, 10 Mar 2003 01:37:02 EST, Kee Hinckley said:
> We filter spam based solely on forged headers and private blacklists 
> plus user preferences.  The number of those messages that have 
> something faked is well over 50%. 
OK.. it's been 2 decades since I took statisics, and I've *mostly*
recovered from being a math/physics major, but...

All this says is that if you didn't filter on blacklists and user prefs,
that 100% of the mail that you tagged as having forged headers have forged
headers.  Addition of the other 2 criteria water it down to "over 50%".

Problem 1)  There's no indication of what percent of mail with forged
headers was actually spam - and without your definition of what counts
as "forged", it's hard to tell.  I know that *this* laptop has sent some
rather squirrelly headers when I'm travelling and borrowing some net access.

Problem 2) There's no indication of what percent of your total mail volume
got tagged as "forged headers".  If it's 1% of your total or 40% of your
total is important, as they have different implications for what solutions
have to be able to do...

Problem 3) There's no indication of what sorts of overlaps there are between
the forged, blacklist, and preferences.  If most of the mail that's forged
is *also* being hit by blacklist and/or preferences, then maybe checking for
forged headers isn't productive.  If it's catching lots of spam that your
blacklists and preferences aren't catching, maybe that's indicative of problems
with those two schemes...

(And no Kee, I'm not picking on you in particular - I didn't accept Vernon's
DCC numbers at face value either.  Nobody here uses the same methodology,
and it's hard to avoid comparing apples to oranges without asking what
sort of seeds were planted in both cases....

/Valdis

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