On Monday, November 10, 2003, at 03:02 PM, Marc Baber wrote:
Please forgive me for singling you (Larry) out as the expert on the subject of [EMAIL PROTECTED], but you've been very helpful on the topic more than once in the past and I suspect you're our best hope of finding answers to a troubling problem:Well I can't complain about being considered an expert however regrettable the topic.
I've been noticing that all e-mail coming to me from the local Dean campaign is flagged as [EMAIL PROTECTED] by EFN's servers.spamassassin is a filtering solution analogous to using a pitchfork on a river in flood,
it's effective at moving debris out of the way, but it's not exactly selective...
Had I not specifically requested and arranged for my [EMAIL PROTECTED] to be delivered instead of silently deleted, the EFN system would have deleted this e-mail without informing me and I would not be aware of the event announced in this e-mail.
Being great believers in Free Speech and RFC observance, we do not throw mail away unless the member in question requests that we do so, we do recommend sending things to a spamcan directory that gets purged, or running local filters and use the tagging to presort.
Most people don't make the arrangements that I have to see their spam and decide for themselves. I wonder how many EFN users opted into this list and will never hear about the upcoming event because of EFN's [EMAIL PROTECTED] filters?
So if we announce that we are globally whitelisting all mail from [EMAIL PROTECTED] (by announce I mean leave exposed to google as this message will be) are we gonna get stuck with a zillion messages starting off with.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Enhan(E yr m4n|-|00D
I wonder how that may effect attendance at the event? funds raised? election outcome? (Yeah, I know, but hey, it was *real* close last time!)(teehee)
On a more serious note, we are turning things off and making changes that are regrettable, making EFN a less friendly place just by the fact that it won't be possible to have the same feel as back in the days when you could finger anyone's user name and learn about them.
But the neighbourhood has gotten rougher, a lot rougher.
I did just tweak the scores a bit. (hey I got bit by this, I got a mash note that was labeled spam) So we shouldn't be seeing as many false positives.
The overwhelming criterion for identifying this e-mail as [EMAIL PROTECTED] is the "Bayesian [EMAIL PROTECTED] probability". I'm familiar with the term "Bayesian networks" and understand that somebody has probably implemented a spam recognition heuristic based on such technology.
yes oswald,booth and chapman are the spamassasins
My questions are:
1. Is EFN currently using [EMAIL PROTECTED] as the server name "oswald" suggests? If so, what version? If not, what [EMAIL PROTECTED] filter is being used?
2. The "Bayesian probability" suggests to me that there is a repository of reported [EMAIL PROTECTED] somewhere that incoming e-mail is compared against to see if it resembles any previously reported spiced-ham incidents. This leads me to further questions:I am not the keeper of the tofu, or of the canonical spam queue, so I don't know the details on this one, you might ask Mike or Patrick.
a. Is the repository local to EFN or "out there on the 'net". If the latter, where (what URL(s)) is the repository?
b. Who decides what reference e-mails go into the repositor(ies)? What criteria do they use? Can we check to see who may have reported *solicited* (not unsolicited) Dean campaign e-mail?currently we have SA set to 'auto-learn' I am thinking this is a mistake;
If someone, say YOU, were to get together with at least one known and respected conservative (I would suggest Jim Darrough) and crank out a list of the candidates mail
servers that was even-handed, we would certainly use that in our prefiltering.
I think there is a huge incentive for political zealots to abuse spam filters for political goals if they can be so abused. I want to make sure that there are mechanisms in place to prevent such censoring, both at EFN and elsewhere. I welcome knowledge and insights from anyone familiar with popular spam filtering tech.
I admit to a much more bleak and cynical view; i think i will live to see the day when
i tell young people about the "dark times" of SMTP; and they will laugh at me in disbelief
when I tell them that there was very little one could do about someone sending you a message without a persistent identity attached. "You mean you just Trusted people not to pretend they were someone else!!! " they will squeal and giggle and laugh at us benighted people from the 20th century.
Thank you for listening, This issue is likely to become my favorite rant for the coming year :-),
Mine will be The Painful transition from smtp to xmpp or asmtp.
(yes you will need to buy a 5 dollar certificate to send mail through our system, on the other hand all your email will now be followed by a verifiable audit trail)[1]
1. let's just be clear the part in parentheses falls into the category (funny were it not tragic)
-- "The Internet is falling" --C. Little 2003
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