On Thu, 18 Nov 2004, Hannah Schroeter wrote:
Hello!
On Tue, Nov 16, 2004 at 10:46:37AM -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote:
[...]
Remark about (amongst others) SPF:
`` Many have described the email authentication systems as promoting a
policy that says email is "spam unless proven otherwise." ''
That is in fact what Meng is promoting.
And in fact that is in agreement with simple statistics. MOST email today
is spam. That is not a 'position' - it is simple numbers. Since 4AM today,
I have recieve 295 emails. About 220 of them were automatically classified
as spam and an additional 10 or so got sent to my junk box for further
evaluation (they were all spam - I checked). I don't even _look_ in my
primary spam folder anymore because I would spend hours per day on it. I
just delete the entire folder every few days to keep it from taking over
all the space on the hard drive.
And while I might not have much say in here or in other standardization
bodies, I still agree with Paul Graham: false negatives are an
opimtization criterion; false positives are a bug.
When spam is present at such high volumes as to cause people to manually
and heuristically delete legitimate emails at a higher rate than the false
positive rate of an authentication system, it isn't a bug: It's an
improvement on the status quo.
At this point, all mail must be considered spam until proven innocent.
--
Benjamin Franz