----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2005 4:41
PM
Subject: [Declude.JunkMail] Negative
weighting filters to reduce false positives
We just started something I've been thinking
about for a while: Negative weight tests to offset specific test
failures for well-known domains. For
example, a large number of false positives we see are from Earthlink,
Mindspring, Sprint, Verizon, etc.
Now you may be thinking, of course, these are
large providers with dial-up user bases, so you would expect a large
percentage of false positives to be from them...but hold on a
minute. Many of these large domains are being penalized in our system
for routing or not having abuse@ or postmaster@ addresses. Almost all of
these would not have ended up in the hold queue if they had not been so
penalized...thus the idea to figure out a manageable way to NOT penalize them
for these technical RFC violations.
So, what we've done is to start filters to
counteract the weights for major tests that a few of these domains fail.
By doing it specifically for a particular domain, we reduce false positives
but avoid losing the effectiveness of the test on other
domains.
Anyway, attached zip are the filter
files. As I mentioned, they have just been started, so there are just a
few domains in them at present. At the top of the filter file are
suggested guidelines on how to use them. There are probably better ways
to handle this, so I welcome comments/feedback.
Darin.
