On 11/07/10 16:04, Bram Moolenaar wrote:
This appears to happen more often these days: I send a message to a user
and some blacklist system blocks my message. I have no control over
what my ISP does, these services simply block my message without a way
for me to fix this.
Please, don't use these blacklist services, they are very annoying.
They think they can reduce spam, but only by blocking legitimate
messages. I rather have 100 spam messages than losing one real message.
Also, there is no reliable way to tell if a message is spam or not.
Some of these services even ask money to be removed from the list, which
is close to extortion.
Specifically my message to George Reilly started failing today.
Messages to Mattias Winther were blocked for a longer time.
In most cases the problem lies with the receiving ISP (Matthias's and
George's, in this case). Some ISPs will drop on the floor incoming mail
that "they think" is spam, others let you customize your email account
to enable or disable filtering (but do they do what they say?), still
others will filter "spam" to someplace where you can inspect it (let's
say a webmail or IMAP folder other than Inbox). This way you may "fish
back" false positives, and in some cases, by marking both false
positives and false negatives (the latter being what spam went through
the filters without being recognized as such) "teach" a Bayesian
filtering system to recognize legit vs. spam mail with better and better
(though of course never perfect) accuracy.
This possibility to inspect what was labeled as spam is why I switched
to Gmail (which offers it; I'm sure there are others); of course I have
to periodically check, on their webmail interface, "Trash" for spam that
was delivered to me over POP3 as legit and "Spam" for legit mail that
was held when it shouldn't have been.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
The wind doth taste so bitter sweet,
Like Jaspar wine and sugar,
It must have blown through someone's feet,
Like those of Caspar Weinberger.
-- P. Opus
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