Markus,
I have found that my users miss about 99% of the false positives using
a system where I set up review accounts in Web-mail for each domain and
only capture less than 2% of their blocked volume for them to review.
Reprocessing and reporting the message is done with a single click
using a link that I added to the interface for this purpose. I know
that they miss this much because we also do review for the hold range
across our entire user base, however we don't guarantee in any way that
we will find every false positive or review this with specific
regularity. Obviously as volume increases, so does the work required
for us to do this, but it is quite easy for all but a couple of our
domains to be reviewed because the number of held messages are
generally below 20 a day, and only 7 days are kept.
I too am looking to move to a 'push' format, figuring that if you
deliver a message daily to each domain's administrator showing this
small sampling where false positives are almost exclusively held, I
will dramatically increase the amount of user feedback and more
importantly, lessen the dependence on us. I have only had one customer
that was ever upset about false positives, and this customer dropped
us. The issue there was that the domain owner's wife was very big on
free-deals sites, and their daily E-mails were often being blocked and
they never gave us enough time to clean up all of the issues.
Personally, I don't feel that our service is appropriate for people
that value such things so highly, especially since so much of it is
associated with spam (shared or brokered lists).
So having this Web-mail review for each domain has in fact provided us
with feedback from those few that feel that this is important to them.
I have found that the people driven enough to do the review do in fact
often report false positives for sources like eWeek and Orbitz, even
things as pointless as surveys. I do very much appreciate the
feedback, and I have killed entries from my own blacklist repeatedly as
a result of these reports after finding that people did want to make
their own choices with the tertiary stuff. Since they are also
generally tech types, they favor tech content, probably due to
familiarity as well as favorites. Those that don't regularly do review
however are much less likely to report advertising or low-value
newsletters/subscriptions as being false positives. These types are
also strangely enough much more likely to report a phishing attempt as
a false positive, and that has happened 3 times that I can recall (I'm
improving my phishing filters to get this stuff deleted more often
instead of just held). So the gist of this is that I get the feeling
that just like us, the administrators of these individual domains have
their own sub-conscious rules that they use.
This is all a bit secondary to my original inquiry however. What I was
really interested in was what rules people like yourself use in
determining whether something is ham or spam.
Thanks,
Matt
Markus Gufler wrote:
I'm close to finish a reporting
tool that will send out a daily notification to the local recipient if
new messages was hold on the mailserver with a final weight slightly
above the hold weight (up to now we review this messages regulary and
can find an average of one false positive each day by around 15k
delivered messages)
The notification contains only a
link to a webpage where the user can see his hold messages and klick on
it to requeue them.
I'm curios what my customers
will consider "not spam" :-)
Markus
This was the subject of a recent off-list discussion between myself and
Pete where there was a perception that my definition of spam was too
conservative or rather my definition of ham was too liberal. While I
readily admit that in practice, I do personally wish to block
many fewer things that I consider to be legitimate first-party
advertising than most do, I don't necessarily get the impression that
the definitions that I use are all that much off the mark. I have also
found that the folks at BondedSender think that I am some sort of
anti-advertising zealot for reporting what is near universally what we
would consider to be spam, so it does go both ways :) So I wanted to
throw this topic out for some feedback and other presentations of one's
own definitions and maybe learn something in the process.
First off, I naturally follow the basic definition of spam that is
widely promoted where spam is both unsolicited and bulk. What
causes such wide derivation from this common definition however is the
sub-definition of what constitutes unsolicited, and the gray area that
exists beyond this definition due to abuse.
The definition that I use to qualify advertising or newsletter related
ham is as follows:
This definition starts with me treating things as ham
if it comes from a first-party relationship with the sender, however
there are some exceptions as follows:
- Evidence of the first-party having harvested significant
numbers of recipients in the list, i.e.: Reunion(dot)com.
- Refusal to honor opt-outs.
- Having no opt-out mechanism for repeated E-mails that are
advertising related.
- Third-party ads being sent by first-party source when they
are not the primary reason for a membership, example: Sportsline's
partner specials
- Very widespread abuse of a particular direct-marketing
provider where most customers of a service are spamming, example:
Uptilt.
- Selling subscriber lists from one otherwise legitimate site
to spammers or brokering lists for spamming, example: many joke sites.
It's my belief that many would consider this definition to be agreeable
(please speak up if you don't), however I am near certain that in
practice there is a good amount of derivation from this even among
those that would at least initially agree with the above.
The issue of applying this in practice to me means that I try not to
apply my own emotions or judgments of value to a particular sender.
This means that I treat advertising from J.Crew just the same on my
system as E-mail from Orbitz, though I personally find Orbitz and most
other travel sites to be annoying with their frequency and low in value
to the recipient. The trick here is that I have found no evidence of
harvesting from either source, and they both practice default-opt-in to
their newsletters from their customer-base, and they both seemingly
honor opt-outs, so the only difference that I perceive is the subject
matter of the E-mails. I have found that many administrators will
blacklist Orbitz and even report them to SpamCop, while this is less
commonly the case with J.Crew. So the determining factor that is often
used regardless of a stated or intended definition appears to be a
value judgment placed on the content of the E-mails, either consciously
or unconsciously. Would anyone agree or disagree with this perception?
One last note: personally I find the industry standard practice of
default-opt-in for customer lists to be disturbing, but if one was to
consider that alone as a qualifier of spam, over 99% of advertising
messages that pass my definition above would fail the much tighter
definition of double-opt-in for requesters only. Since this has become
the standard practice in the entire industry, I allow for it just so
long as they follow my rules since I definitely have customers
(including myself) that do wish to receive some of what is sent to me
without initially requesting it, and my customers have the power to
opt-out and report any abuse to me for appropriate action.
Please add your comments or even your own definitions.
Thanks,
Matt
--
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MailPure custom filters for Declude JunkMail Pro.
http://www.mailpure.com/software/
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--
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MailPure custom filters for Declude JunkMail Pro.
http://www.mailpure.com/software/
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