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Re: [Asrg] A paper/project worth considering (found it!)

2008-12-15 12:46:10
Steve Atkins wrote:

On Dec 15, 2008, at 3:31 AM, Alessandro Vesely wrote:

Chris Lewis wrote:
Rich Kulawiec wrote:
What I'm arguing (and I've argued this elsewhere) is that it's not
the role of end users to set anti-spam policy (in whole or in part)
any more than it's their role to set firewall policy.  It's not their
job, and they're terrible at it.
I don't think many would argue against that.

I would, for one.

I would too. The defining characteristic of objectionable email
is that recipients find it objectionable. ISPs block mail that
recipients find objectionable or (much more rarely) causes
them operational problems.

So, by that definition, recipients drive mail filtering policy.
And "objectionable" is a superset of "spam". Which is why whines
about users pressing the junk being "incorrect" fundamentally misses
the point: it's not their fault that the receivers of the feedback have
such a procrustean view of what constitutes "objectionable"; the
users are just telling them something they don't want to hear.

The day that we stop thinking in terms of universal truths ("is
objectively spam or not") is the day that we start to make forward
progress from the user's standpoint. Baysian filtering already gets
that, which is why it's so popular even if the sample sizes are tiny.

      Mike
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