On Apr 03 2006, John Levine wrote:
To stay on topic, do you accept that with your definition, the only
authority which can reliably decide consent (and therefore spamminess)
is the receiver?
Not really. I get spam complaints all the time for mail from lists
that I know perfectly well that they signed up for and confirmed.
"Oh, I don't want that any more." For the ones that aren't totally
redacted, my setup turns them into unsubs so they don't get any more
mail for that particular list, but I don't think it's fair to count
mail as spam if it depends on reading the recipient's mind in
real-time.
Isn't that perilously close to saying that if they decided something
in the past, they're not allowed to change their mind?
My position is that there's absolutely nothing wrong with the "spam is
what I say is spam" definition. It's workable, provided you keep spam
filtering at the ends of the network, ie the desktop.
The issue is feedback. You don't want the spam complaints because you
don't consider yourself these people's spam filter. Chris actually
is in some sense his customers' spamfilter, and he goes out of his way
to obtain feedback. A trainable desktop filter, whatever the way it
works internally, is designed to allow quick feedback to make the "spam is
what I say is spam" definition workable.
I also have no problem admitting that for group filtering during SMTP
transport, the "spam is what I say is spam" definition isn't great.
For one, it's hard to reconcile two users who respectively want and
not want a particular type of message. Another definition such as
"did you consent?" is possibly better.
We know there are plenty of definitions. It's important to agree on one
in any one discussion.
Testing spam filters is a really, really hard problem, for all the
reasons that people have mentioned, basically that you can't test
without perturbing the system you're testing, and you can't capture
enough state to rerun the same test more than once. So you have to
estimate based on complaint rates from bounces and the like.
Sure is, or nobody would make a big deal about it. I don't agree that
perturbing the system is necessary, however. In the end, testing is
about making the most of the information that's actually available. If
what you have is a dnsbl verdict rather than a message body (say),
then you use that and don't throw up your arms and say "why can't I
have a message body?".
But again, it's important that all discussants use the same
definition, etc. The devil is in the details.
--
Laird Breyer.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg