[SC-Help] Re: Spammers getting smarter?

[Geoff Lane]

"Mike Easter" <MikeE at ster.invalid> wrote in news:cubj19$8j5$1
@news.spamcop.net:

> but among other things you should have whitelisted all
> of your mailing lists and friends a long time ago.

Unfortunately not so easy when a mailing list uses the OP's address in 
the From field (which is what TBUDL does) and the mailing list address in 
Reply-To. Spampal only appears to allow whitelisting on the From address, 
which implies that I need to whitelist every list member.

Also, I work freelance and get a significant amount of mail from 
prospective clients and agents. Often I haven't heard from someone for 
months or even years until one of their messages ends up in my spambin.

Friends and family get whitelisted as soon as I know their address. 
However, I need to know their address first, and they usually seem to 
tell me by sending a message from the new address.

Even if you don't get false positives, it doesn't mean that others
don't. So, unqualified advice not to look at suspected spam (to decide
whether it is actually spam) is IMO dangerous. I infered from your
original post advice to the OP to rely on anti-spam filtering to decide
whether each message was spam ("You should *not* be examining spam 
subjects and spam froms with your human eyeballs...") As I've pointed 
out, relying solely on something like Spampal is dangerous -- Spampal is 
not infallible (and IIRC, advises against automatically deleting messages 
it tags as spam for precisely that reason).

That said, how can you be 100% sure that you have no undetected false 
positives? Surely, to be 100% sure means inspecting each trapped message, 
and I infer from your previous posts that you don't do that.

-- 
Geoff Lane
Cornwall, UK