--On Tuesday, February 25, 2003 10:04 PM -0800 J C Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 23:02:27 -0500 > Tom Neff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> --On Tuesday, February 25, 2003 7:20 PM -0800 J C Lawrence >> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 22:06:16 -0500 Barry A Warsaw >>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>> The difference is that those are your fault, not your software's >>> fault. > >> That is, as they say, a distinction without a difference. A missed >> legitimate email has no way of knowing whether it was missed as the >> result of software miscalibration or a tired eye on the 1AM Inbox. > > True, objectively, but there is a significant subjective difference. In > one way I had the opportunity to see the mail, and didn't, and the other > way something hid it from me without my explicit per-message consent. > > Think like a control freak...
I always think like a control freak. :) A good spam filter doesn't write to /dev/null, it reroutes to a holding pen. There, just like with a nonfiltered approach, I have the opportunity to see it (now or later) if I want. This sometimes happens when I order from a new merchant. These days what I tend to do (unless I want to maintain an 'account' of some kind) is create a temporary email alias, like [EMAIL PROTECTED], and use that for my transaction. (This allows me to go through my aliases file every week and delete old temp aliases, so that even if a merchant sells its database the addy is useless for future spam.) So I make my purchase, carefully noting that the paisley waffle iron is in stock :) - and also use a one-time "virtual card number" from Citibank where possible - and wait for my emailed confirmation of charge and shipping. Sometimes I don't see it right away, and sometimes that's because the merchant sends confirms that Bayes-test a bit spammy. So I just pop open the 'spamhold' folder in Mulberry, and bang there the confirm is. I drag it to a holding folder called 'spamgood' which is harvested once a minute by a cron job that takes each message, whitelists it in the Bayes filter, and throws it over into my Inbox. Now I'm good with that merchant for as long as I want to keep the alias around. I just thought I'd give an example of a technique. The other thing I do is periodically purge that 'spamhold' folder, but before I do, I search for all messages sent *personally* to my one or two real-McCoy addresses, and do a quick scan of the From field to see if anyone I know is worth rescuing. Anything I see (a musician's tour dates for example) I drag to Spamgood. Then I purge and reset the spamhold folder. I also have a log (1 line per email) that I never purge, so if by chance someone says to me "I sent you that powerpoint file three months ago" I can check.
