My question to the group is, if you read all the anti-spam vendors
(me included), they all claim high-9 catch rates and near-zero false
positives. If this is the case, why are we still here [...]?
I can only think of one of three reasons:
1. The vendor claims are false. In the real world, you still get
lots of undesireable email.
2. The vendor claims are true, but we're a bunch of perfectionists
searching for infinite resolution of Pi.
3. The filtering paradigm is a non-solution due to increased use of
recipient resources (bandwith, storage, processing, end-user time,
etc)
I think there is some truth in each.
(1) is true to an extent. Some of those claims are, doubtless, utterly
fabricated; some more (probably a lot more) are true but only for a
particular kind of user, kind of site, kind of whatever. My own
filtering, for example, is probably somewhere around two nines - but to
get that I do some things that some sites Just Can't Do, such as
rejecting HTML out of hand.
(2) is probably true to an extent too, though I think it more likely
that we're rejecting the vendor "solutions" not so much because we're
perfectionists but because we're not interested in proprietary turnkey
"solutions". I know I'm not - open-source your filters and I may
consider them, but I'm not interested in anything closed-source or
otherwise proprietary. (If nothing else I simply have no budget - I
can and do pay with my time, but if it takes money it's a nonstarter.)
(3) certainly has truth to it too. When your pipe is redlined with SYN
packets, it doesn't matter how little processing you do on each one, to
cite just one example.
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