On July 8, 2002 at 11:05, Jon Steinhart wrote:
And I agree, downloading the entire message is the way to go. Most spam is
very small compared to even slow V90 speeds which is what I'm stuck with out
in the country here, so it's no big deal.
Well, I would have to disagree about spam being small and no big deal
over V90 modem. Spam messages have been increasing in size since many
are HTML messages and some with attachments or images. Also, if you
are flooded with alot of messages, they add up.
Of course, the annoyance factor is relative for any given person, but
when I was using dialup, I definitely considered writing my own
POP filtering tool with interactive capabilities to avoid downloading
crap (and sometimes the messages may not be spam but from friends and/or
relatives sending huge-assed attachments that I did not care about).
However, once I got cable modem, my need for such a tool dropped
considerably.
A side note: I considering spam filtering, and other filtering needs,
mainly delivery issue. Hence, I think it is best solved done before
nmh even sees the mail (the boundary is somewhat lose when dealing
with automatic filing of messages to different folders). This keeps
the filtering job independent of the MUA and prevent developers
re-implementing the wheel for every MUA.
I have a set of changes that I'll submit at an appropriate time.
These changes allow .mh_profile entries that name programs that are
executed whenever a piece of mail is incorporated, removed, or refiled.
A nice feature.
--ewh
This has the potential to go way off topic for this mailing list, but...
I agree that a fair number of bytes are consumed by spam. It isn't a
huge problem for me because even though V90 is the best that I can do
out here in the sticks, it's a full time connection so I'm not waiting
on mail delivery.
I find it hard to see filtering as a delivery issue, but that's probably
because I read my mail on my machine which uses sendmail to deliver mail;
I'm not dialing in somewhere to pick up mail. If I need to read mail on
the road, I ssh into my machine and read it there.
The big issue on filtering is that everybody wants to filter different
things. Strange as it seems, some people even like to collect spam for
study. One of the big difficult issues on filtering is that, while an
occasional false positive can be tolerated, false negatives are completely
unacceptable. A system that keeps all of your mail and only shows you
interesting messages doesn't lose anything, which helps that problem. But
it requires sucking down all messages.
Another example, I remember Gosling telling me that especially since he's
become embroiled in the Sun/MS suits that a mirror copy of all of his
incoming and outgoing mail is kept for legal reasons. This wouldn't work
if incoming mail was rejected based on headers.
Jon