[SC-Help] Re: Spammers getting smarter?

[Mike Easter]

Geoff Lane wrote:
> Most of the
> remainder fall foul of the Bayesian plugin.

If I were using a filter or plugin which was tagging goodmail, I would
either eliminate or reconfigure that filter.  Surprisingly or
interestingly, compared to other people, I'm not using the SP Bayesian
plugin, just the regex and url body ones.   I'm mostly dependent upon my
selection of dnsbl/s.

The whole idea of a spam filter is to *not* 'eliminate' good mail, even
if there is some porosity.  In this case replace eliminate with tag.
Theoretically, someone might choose to use a properly constructed
idealized [porosity but 'never' a false positive] filter to eliminate
spam.

I don't want to get into a debate about that deleting, because there are
flaws in that argument for some mail profiles -- how to idealize a
filter depends very much on the ability to discriminate /wisely/ the
qualities of the wanted mail from the qualities of the unwanted mail -- 
and that would mean specifically for that person's *real* mail, not some
'universal' hypothetical model.

So, someone who is able to reject mail during the transaction might
configure in some way which ran a very small risk of bouncing a wanted
mail, because that isn't always so bad.  Inconvenient perhaps, but far
superior to losing it.

The SpamPal user who is tagging and also SpamCop reporting that tagged
mail has some advantages over the SP user who is deleting the tagged
mail otherwise unseen except by SP.  The SP SC reporter has an
additional opportunity to overview during the reporting process.  If the
SP SC reporter's experiences are that the SP tagging *never* shows a
false positive, the strategy is going to be different from someone for
whom that tagging of wanted mail is a very very real problem.  Tagging
wanted mail is highly undesirable and 'must' be eliminated, in my
opinion.

And, what I would do about it would be to configure my SP so that it was
'never' [almost never?] giving me false positives.

-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin