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Re: [Asrg] Adding a spam button to MUAs

2009-12-22 09:44:02


On Tue, 22 Dec 2009, Ian Eiloart wrote:



--On 21 December 2009 19:24:06 +0100 Matthias Leisi <matthias(_at_)leisi(_dot_)net> wrote:


Am 21.12.09 18:46, schrieb Nathaniel Borenstein:

distinction, it's whether the users can.  If the users can't use the
client's two buttons with sufficiently low error rates, then the
resulting data can't possibly be useful to the admins.  In other

When I was responsible for spamfilter operation at a former job, error
rates of "human spamfilters" were considerably higher than FP rates of
any possible solution. This is not scientific evidence, but it
illustrates it nicely:

I nice story. It says that we must not block mail on a single report, especially a report from a different user. That's fair enough, but it's not what anyone is suggesting.

The current question is how can we make it easier for users to report spam to administrators. The question of what administrators do with the reports is secondary - though it might inform the kind of information that they want to gather.



Whether you want one or two buttons depends upon whether you have one or two actions to take. If you have only individual spam filters, then you only need one button, call it the "unwanted - unsubscribe" button which would attempt to unsubscribe where suitable headers were present, and would block otherwise. If you have both individual and global filters, then you need both "unwanted - unsubscribe" and "spam" buttons. And you probably want to inspect the "spam" items before adding them to any global filter.

If I review my own decisions later, I find that about 1% of the time I call something I want spam, but I am much more likely to fail to call spam as spam. In any case the error percentage must be calculated as a percentage of mail, not a percentage of reports to be usefull.

As to the accuracy of user decisions, if you give users only one button, they are likely to be less accurate than if they have two buttons. since they will have no opportunity to select the correct button, they will likely select the wrong one rather than do nothing at all.

Daniel Feenberg
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