On 17 May 2002, at 10:00, Mike Avery wrote: > Moreover, you don't have to block the email. You can > send it to the intended recipient with text added to the > subject line. Something like, "*** SPAM SUSPECT ***, > which allows the recipient to deal with it.
We tried that and found it wholly unacceptable --- basically, every false positive involves, in essence, trashing a legitimate message. [consider doing a 'reply' to such a message.. it'll be a constant pain that you have to remember to edit the subject line]. We currently have our filter set up to add an additional header line, basically something like: X-this-looks-like-spam: WHY where the 'WHY' is whatever triggered the detection [so that users that have trouble with particular heuristics can 'tune' which 'WHY's they like and which they choose to ignore]. BUT -- we then discovered that OE [that cursed piece of crap] cannot filter on anything but the 'normal' headers... After a lot of screwing around, we eventually decided that putting a comment after the 'To' address was about the least obtrusive, but still-OE-filterable, place to put the spam-notice [we also still add the X-header for folk with non-crippled mail clients, of course]. >.. Some people don't mind missing some legitimate > emails as well. I was *astounded* to learn this. I get regular bounces from world, thanks to their dumb, overaggressive filtering system, and when I informed the on-world listmembers that they were losing about 5% of the contributions to the list (and presumably also lord-only-knows how much other email) they just said they don't care. For my part, the moment I learned that world was "helping me" [sic] by blocking some of my incoming email, I was *out*of*there*... I wonder how many folk really DO have that attitude [that is, not caring if some percentage of their incoming email is just trashed and vanishes]. Just think how easy it would be: you could cut spam in half for those folk just by discarding half of their incoming email at random, sight unseen...:o) What's scary is that they might think that's OK and only complain that it didn't bag ALL of their spam... [at which point, you just dump ALL of their incoming email and make them happy campers..:o)] /Bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <--
