Deepa Mohan [06/07/07 11:50 +0430]:
Since I am not a techie, I want to know, especially with reference to
Yahoo...what happens when I mark something on my inbox as spam? I get
a standard "thank you" saying that it helps every time I identify
something as spam...but of late, I notice that my Yahoo id is getting
Not yahoo or gmail but I do run spam filtering at a largish (about 40..60%
of yahoo's size I'd guess) email provider so here goes ..
Email is fed to the filters for analysis. And IPs, domains, whatever get
blocked, or classified as spam.
Not all reports trigger blocks though - several people have to click spam
on a particular type of email to increase the chance of its getting
filtered
Gmail seems to spend lots more on bayesian or whatever similar per user
filtering than yahoo does .. but then they have a rather smaller userbase
and can probably afford it (plus being google, they have tons of cash and a
huge, huge server farm for a whole lot of other stuff so no shortage of
cpu, disk etc for this stuff)
But again - on a per mailbox basis I'd just say it depends on which of your
email addresses has landed up in a spammer's list and which one hasnt.
The one that more spammer(s) have [and they can get it easily from mailing
list archives, the address book of an infected PC, whatever] gets more spam
And if your email address is a really old one (of the sort that has been
around for years with you, or was around for years, then closed for 2..3
years and then recycled back into the general pool for others to use it)
then you get more spam that way.
And..what if, erroneously, I identify an email from a friend as spam?
(Obviously, in the present spam-work-is-God's work scenario, I am
under no risk.) Are they then hunted down?
One report wont - typically - trigger a block.
In the fancier places, it is a question of "IP reputation" - the identity
of who owns the IP, the % of spam reports v/s non spam email from the IP
etc (and if your friend uses yahoo, or hotmail or one of our domains,
little chance if any that gmail will filter them, and vice versa.. large
ISPs tend to take care not to block each other)
srs
