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I would tend to agree with you that these are false
positives. Eweek, Infoworld, Birthday Express, Best Buy, Chadwicks cause regular
spam tagging here.
If it is a company I've heard of and the links and
such point back to that company, I usually give it the benefit of the
doubt.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 6:35
AM
Subject: Re: [sniffer] My issues with the
General category, looking forabettersolution
Greg,
Yes, I should have inserted a "probably" or
otherwise taken more care with my words. I didn't mean for my reply to
be contentious.
Anyway, here's a sample of what I am talking
about. I've isolated most major bulk-mail providers from the rest of my
Hold E-mail which constitutes about 2% of all blocked mail on my system.
From midnight though 7 a.m. (7 hours) I had 49 messages held that were from
these providers. Of those 49 messages, 42 were false positives, partly
due to my own fault in weighting Big Foot Interactive to auto-hold, but of the
42, 26 were tagged by Sniffer-General. Those were from the following
companies:
Circuit City
Sur La
Table (a wine shop)
eWEEK
Daily
Inbox
Harry and David
Things
Remembered
What I think is happening is that people buy something
online at Circuit City, and then Circuit City automatically adds them to their
E-mail list, and then someone that doesn't like the practice of default opt-in
reports it to Sniffer and it is added to the General category. The same
thing probably happened to most of the list above except for Daily Inbox which
is not related to commerce. There is also a possibility of some
harvesting or not honoring opt-outs, but the sample above is not nearly as bad
or suggestive of such as most Sniffer-General hits.
I have also found
that SpamCop and SenderDB-Block have similar issues, often having what I
personally consider to be false positives on first-party advertising such as
the list above (at least one of the three paid a role in virtually all of the
42 false positives this morning). I get the feeling that SpamCop has
either dirty spamtraps (old dead accounts or catch-alls used as spamtraps) or
there are enough submissions of this stuff for them to tag these sources, and
I have a feeling that Alligate which powers SenderDB has bayesian filtering
that isn't friendly to advertising content or is triggered by other things
like SpamCop, or shared IP's are causing the hits on some of it.
Am I
just one of a few that considers these things to be false positives? Do
others just not really care if this stuff gets blocked? I'm not sure,
but I don't want to keep reporting these things as FP's only to piss off the
people that are reporting them, and I don't wish for the people that consider
them to be spam to impact my system in the way that it is currently if I can
help it, and I hope there is an easier way to approach this. Note that I
expect no miracles, I just thought this was something that might be fruitful
to discuss.
Matt
System Administrator wrote:
on 12/16/04 5:36 PM, Matt wrote:
The reason why you aren't seeing these is because you aren't weighting Sniffer
General at your subject tagging or hold weight, so it takes multiple hits for
the false positives to show up on your system.
Wow, I didn't realize you knew so much about my system. By the way, is 33
more or less than 30? I've always thought 33 (sniffer-general weight on my
system) was more than 30 (subject tagging weight), but if you are telling me
it is less, ...
Greg
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