What I find most fascinating about this thread is that it has the same tone as most spammers use to justify their activities:
1) "My message is important"
2) "I don't promise that I'm only sending my message to people who have asked for it"
3) "It's sensorship to block my message"
4) "Someone might sue!"
I'm impressed.
-----Original Message-----
From: Marc Perkel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 10:54 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [Razor-users] Lets at least be honest about what Razor does
For those who claim that reporting spam is just a form of free speech, let me
refute that.
People use Razor and Spamassassin for only one reason - to filter spam. To
filter spam in an automated way in fact. The idea is for these tools to look at
all email and do something with it and to alter messages determined to be spam
in some way as to distinguish them from non-spam email.
The way this is accomplished varies according to how it is implemented. In some
vases the message is blacckholed or bounced based on this automated process. In
some cases it is tagged as spam in a way that users can autodelete it or move it
into a spam folder that is often not read.
So - lets be honest here. Email tagged with Razor is far less likely to get read
that email not tagged. After all - if you're going to go through each and every
message you get - then why have a spam filter? And even you YOU do - a lot of
EFF subscribers don't and therefore the good work that the EFF is doing is
blocked by possibly ONE person who ACCIDENTALLY perhaps reported it as spam.
For the people in this forum to claim that spam flagging doesn't matter is not
being honest about how Razor works or how it is actually used in the real world.
Razor has already cost organizations like moveon.org hundreds of thousands of
dollers in lost donations because of email that was blocked or mislabeled as a
result of automated filtering processes that in part relied on Razor's
inaccurate information.
I am addressing this because I am trying to point out that Razor is extremely
vulnerable to being gamed and is also acting irresponsibly - possibly
negligently - and is causing real damage to free speech. I am trying to pint
this out so that you can fix these issues before Razor does damage to someone
and someone starts suing people. In such a case - if a plaintiff can show real
damages and that the damages were caused by Razor's flagging - and Razor was
asked to explain their side of why it was flagged and replied "I dunno" - it
wouldn't be pretty.
If Razor is flawed - which it clearly is - the logical solution is to fix the
flaws. I would rather talk about better methods that can be used to distinguish
free speech from spam. I want to talk about how Razor can be fixed because it is
a good tool and is a useful way to catch spam once it's working right.
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