"Alan DeKok" <aland(_at_)ox(_dot_)org> wrote:
What I have said repeatedly, and you have obviously not understood,
is that if the recipient cannot tell the difference between
"legitimate" messages matching a particular characteristic, and
"spam" messages with the same characteristics, then the recipient
cannot tell the two classes of messages apart.
You mean, if someone can't tell the difference between non-spam and
spam then he can't tell the difference between non-spam and spam? How
is that a useful observation?
The recipient may well then decide
to treat *all* such messages as spam.
The recipient *may* decide _anything_.
a) lack of information means that decisions becomes more difficult
Of course.
b) the recipient makes its own decisions about what to do
Not a new observation, either.
The question is whether or not a particular characteristic may be
_useful_ to a recipient. That characteristic might be "I have reason
to believe the From: header is not forged" or "I have reason to
believe the MAIL FROM argument is not forged" or "I have reason to
believe the HELO argument is not forged" or "The body of the text
contains 27 words or phrases I've seen in Nigerian spam and not in
other email". All of those _can be useful_. None of them is
determinative. (For instance, the latter might be a procmail recipe
to eliminate Nigerian spam.)
Going back to the original question of maybe-forged-From
vs. known-not-forged-From, the former is much more likely to be spam;
but most of my legitimate email is in the latter category, so treating
it all as spam would be foolish.
Seth
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