ietf-asrg
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Re: [Asrg] Adding a spam button to MUAs

2009-12-22 14:54:24

On Dec 22, 2009, at 12:45 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:

And it's not like this sort of thing is anything new anyway: lots of vendors 
have "report as
spam" widgets that get bolted onto the side of your favorite MUA. A little 
standardization
would be nice though as it would decouple that UI hassle from the actual job 
of filtering.

Absolutely -- the report-spam UI will almost certainly be better if it's 
integrated with the MUA and agnostic regarding the spam engine receiving the 
report.  The only major open question I'm hearing is how much information that 
report should contain.  Clearly it should be no more than the number of bits 
that the user himself can be relied on to provide, where our differing opinions 
might be resolved via user studies.

It might also be worth considering offering 1 button to most users, but 2 
buttons to users who understand the distinction well enough to change a default 
in their MUA in order to get 2 buttons instead of 1.  I conjecture that the 
users who would take that action would have a much lower error rate than the 
average user.   In that scenario, most users would send back a single bit 
"unwanted" message, but sophisticated users could send back two (or even more?) 
types of "unwanted" message.  That might be the cleanest data we could hope to 
get. -- Nathaniel
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