Rich Kulawiec <rsk(_at_)gsp(_dot_)org> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 05:50:24PM -0800, Steve Atkins wrote:
I think allowing end users access to such a button is a terrible idea.
Data from actual reality contradicts your (otherwise plausible) reasoning.
Not my data. I have a rather large collection of incidents involving
message recipients who have marked as spam:
What fraction of the total spam complaints you received were bogus
like those?
Users as a group are far too clueless and careless to be permitted the
privilege of access to such a feature.
That depends on what the feature _does_. A lot of inaccurate
measurements can be used to make a few very accurate measurements.
There's the zombie problem. There is no way for anyone or anything
external to an end-user's system to know whether the button click
(or equivalent event) was generated by a user or by software working
at the behest of the new owner of the user's former system. Given
that the zombie problem is epidemic and presently unstoppable,
widescale deployment of any such mechanism will lead to its use by
zombie-resident malware as soon as it's advantageous for abusers to
do so. Thus, anyone proposing such a "report as spam" mechanism on a
large scale must also include in their proposal a workable plan for
solving the zombie problem.
How would it be advantageous for a zombie to report as spam? Report
as non-spam, sure, to game the filters. But with the data being noisy
to begin with, zombies adding noise don't have much effect; they might
require tuning of the filters.
Seth
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