At 20:23 10/03/03, Jason R. Mastaler wrote:
>"Data Vortex" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>> Hey all, throught some of you might be interested to read a spam
>> filtering article on kuro5hin that mentions TMDA:
>
>Thanks, I generally have no idea when TMDA appears in an article
>unless someone tells me.
>
>I'll respond a bit to the article's criticism of TMDA.
>
>For one, it says:
>
>``It wouldn't work if everyone did it''
>
>but doesn't explain why. What could the author mean by this?

I would guess that he imagines a FAQ 4.12 case: I send a message to a
TMDA-protected account and get a request to confirm; I have TMDA set up
and it doesn't recognize the address the confirm message is coming from,
so the request for a confirmation receives a request to confirm.  So he
never sees my original message and I never see his confirmation message.
The solution is of course explained quite clearly in 
http://tmda.net/faq.cgi?req=all#4.12.  It's unfortunate that the 
"journalist" in question didn't bother to do his homework.


>It also says:
>
>``and it may cause some of your correspondents to just give up without
>confirming that they are human, effectively causing false positives.''
>
>Those who have used TMDA for a period of time know this is a
>misconception, but even if it wasn't; I'm more comfortable with this
>than a classifier which accidentally trashes a message it "thinks" is
>spam. At least with TMDA, the sender has the choice whether or not to
>let his message be delivered to you. With a classifier, he will assume
>it has been delivered when it has not been, creating a communications
>rift.

I might add that, because I deal with many non-technically inclined
people whose mail is nonetheless important to me, every 6 hours I have
TMDA pending send me just the email addresses of those who've received
confirm messages, like this:

[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

It only takes a couple seconds to check, since most spammers have such
obviously "spammy" addresses, if I notice repeaters I can stick them in
badmailfrom, and AFAIK I've never missed an important message.


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