On Thu, Jun 30, 2005, Matan Ziv-Av wrote about "Re: A new venture - preventing spam": > I see (also by Nadav's reply) that I needed to elaborate a bit more. > Your idea might make the spam situation a lot better. Your idea might > make a lot of money (if that is your goal, which was not clear from your > message). But it won't "solve the spam problem". Since there isn't even > an agreed upon definition of spam, there is no way anyone but the > mailbox owner can tell with 100% certainty whether a given message is > spam or not.
Like I said, theoretically speaking, you are right. That's why anti-spam work will not get you any Ph.D. in pure mathematics. But in practice, here is the definition I use: The "spam problem" is the problem that causes 90% of the email I get to be mail that I have no reason to read. I.e., it was not personally written to me, but rather written to many people for some economic/political/whatever reason. If that "90%" figure became "9%" then this would no longer be a "problem" - perhaps just a minor annoyance. The "just hit delete" solution works if you get 100 emails a day and 10 of them are spam, but what if out of the 100 emails, 90 are spam? Speaking from experience, even a human makes mistakes once in a while and presses "delete" on the wrong message. So "solving the problem" doesn't necessitate a 100% solution. A 99%, or maybe even a 90% solution, is already a real solution, because it makes your email readable again. Of course a *good* solution (as opposed to a crappy one) will need to be very sensitive to the problem of false-positives - genuine email mistakenly thought to be spam. When I wrote "90%" above I meant a 10% false-negative rate, and a tiny false-positive rate. Again, this isn't rocket science. It is doable, and if it weren't, I would not have been able to read my email in the last 5 years. And to re-iterate the point I made above: a computerized anti-spam system isn't perfect, whether it is based on filtering (like you appear to assume) or on completely different techniques (authentication, stamps, confirmation emails or whatever) it will make some mistakes, lose some good emails and hand you some spams. But, so what? The same thing will happen if you try to read all your mail on your own, casually hitting "delete" on a non-spam by mistake because for a second you didn't recognize the name. I know, because it happened to me when someone asked me to read his (unfiltered) mail for a week, and I missed a very important message which I assumed was spam. So the important thing is that an automated anti-spam system CAN be better than a human doing it. And I think there is no argument that we need to do something, unless we want to read advice on how to grow various organs all day :-) -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Jun 30 2005, 23 Sivan 5765 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |"I'll doublecross that bridge when I come http://nadav.harel.org.il |to it" (a politician about the future) ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
