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Re: Hashing spam

2003-12-18 16:37:03
On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 03:39:58PM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:
The problem with this analysis is that it assigns greater value to 
contributions from subscribers than to contributions from 
non-subscribers.  But often the failure to accept clues from 
"outsiders" causes working groups to do harm

I don't believe this is true, for any normal definition of "often".  
"Occasionally" might be believable.

 - and filtering messages 
in the #2 category increases this tendency.

One could just as easily argue that such filtering would decrease the
tendency, because people would modify their behavior to subscribe to
groups they cared about.  Also, one could just as easily argue that
working groups are just as likely to be harmed by distracting comments
from outsiders... 

The occasional rejection 
of #2 messages can be very harmful.

Seems more likely to me that the amount of harm would be lost in the
normal noise of ietf processes.

Regards
Kent

On Dec 18, 2003, at 3:01 PM, Vernon Schryver wrote:

 1. on-topic messages from subscribers
 2. on-topic messages from non-subscribers
 3. noise from subscribers
 4. noise from non-subscribers
 5. pure spam such as advertisements for loan sharks

In this list, only #1 is clearly "good." It is good to avoid rejecting
#2, but there is surely no harm in sometimes delaying #2.  If the
senders of any rejected or "false positive" #2 received an informative
non-delivery report so that they could retransmit, what would be the 
harm?

SpamAssassin is reported to be better than 60% accurate.  #2 is surely
rare compared to #1.  Thus, as long as SpamAssassin white-lists all
subscribers, there would be no harm in the occasional rejection of #2.

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent(_at_)icann(_dot_)org,kent(_at_)songbird(_dot_)com            lonesome."
p: +1 310 823 9358  f: +1 310 823 8649               -- Mark Twain
SIP: 81202(_at_)fwd(_dot_)pulver(_dot_)com




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