[BC] If you wonder why email is getting worse

[Harold Hallikainen]

Interesting comments! I'm currently using spamcop.net to refuse
connections from machines identifed as spammers (in the sendmail config).
But, the idea of scoring and using that along with SpamAssassin sounds
interesting. It SEEMS that a way to reduce false positives would be to
automatically generate a white list from someone's address book. Or,
perhaps analyze outgoing mail and accept mail (or put a big negative score
on its spaminess) if this particular user has sent email to this
particular address (perhaps dropping addresses from the list if they have
not been used in a while). That analysis of outgoing mail seems simpler
than requiring users to upload a whitelist. I see, though, that Mozilla
Thunderbird has an option to not mark stuff as junque if the sender is in
your address book. So, maybe this will handle it for Thunderbird users. I
need to get something like that going on SquirrelMail, though I think I
have very few false positives.

Harold



 > Barry Mishkind wrote:
 >> At 02:50 PM 12/7/2006, Al Stewart wrote
 >>> Spamcop is fine -- to a point. I have a problem with them because they
 >>> keep blacklisting legitimate senders.
 >>
 >>         It is hard to pin the tail on who "they" are...
 >>         A LOT of the hassle is caused by lazy people
 >>         who mark email they no longer want as "spam"
 >>         rather than follow the links in each post to
 >>         unsubscribe or otherwise change their subscription.
 >
 > SpamCop.net is one of the more useful RBL's out there.  We use it to
 > help score inbound mail.   I certainly wouldn't rely on it as the
 > be-all, end-all in a spam filtering solution.
 >
 >>         The organizations that keep the lists are ... some
 >>         more than others ... trying to help. There is a
 >>         lot of arrogance out there, too. But, with
 >>         95% +  of all email now being spam, as
 >>         Chris Gebhardt will note, it is impossible to
 >>         operate as an ISP without some of these filters.
 >>         Finding the right balance to filtering the spam
 >>         without holding up real email is not trivial.
 >
 > Amen to that.  We work very hard to find the balance.
 >
 > When you consider that our primary filtering systems identify and reject
 > upwards of 200,000 messages per day as junk, and we maybe hear once
 > every couple of weeks about a legitimate message that was for some
 > reason filtered, I think our system works pretty well.   I won't say
 > it's perfect.  Perfect doesn't exist in this application.  But depending
 > on the day, our filters identify anwhere from 70% - 97% of inbound email
 > as garbage.
 >
 >
 >>         Roadrunner is a perennial problem. They appear
 >>         all the time on the watch lists. Apparently
 >>         customer support is poor, as I rarely hear of
 >>         any success from users in getting help from a
 >>         rr.com support rep.
 >
 > The good news here is that they seem to be improving.   I'm not sure if
 > this has something to do with the Comcast deal or not.   The timing
 > seems to work out.  In any event, I'm not hearing of a customer service
 > improvement (they're still the cable company, after all!) but I can
 > attest to seeing a very large drop in garbage volume from their domains.
 >