On 17/12/2009 2:21 PM, R-Elists wrote: > ...based upon Togami's data processing, the biggest thing that comes to mind > is this... > > *IF* these or similar rulesets are not truly not making a difference one way > or the other, then why are they there? > > why do we really need them or the other similar rulesets?
We can't and aren't really sure that they don't make a difference. Our ham corpus isn't really all that big. For the most part it's probably made up largely of types of mail that Return-Path wouldn't be dealing with on their lists. Clearly it's not containing much mail that Return-Path deals with. The corpus isn't big enough to say that most people (and most people aren't technical people, rather are just common Internet users) won't get mail that Return-Path doesn't deal with though. > ...and why should any rules "such as these" have a default SA installation > value other than "zero" and then educate admins in the documentation what to > do in regards to enabling and suggested scoring? SA is designed to be safe for most users. Most as in general Internet users and safe as in it would rather not tag mail than tag it. IMO whitelists have a place in SA, even whitelists that we cannot determine due to a small corpus size whether or not they're actually making a difference... at least when based on our corpus there's no evidence that they're statistically and drastically causing a significant amount of spam to pass that otherwise wouldn't. We treat blacklists the same way. We include blacklists in the default install to stop spam. We include whitelists because of our core principle of being safe for most users in general. I think the current score changes are a good step. Another step may be including in the release notes that there are whitelists and that people may want to disable them by score whatever rules (a list of them) 0. BTW, I will not waste any cycles defending individual instances on spam getting by because of whitelists for the exact same reason that I do not do the same for ham that gets caught by whitelists. Daryl
