[SC-Help] Re: Spammers getting smarter?

[Mike Easter]

Bert Driehuis wrote:
> I take exception to the
> suggestion that a mechanical tool like SpamPal can replace human
> oversight.

The most important role SpamPal provides in screening my mail is to
examine the headers for the presence of IPs which are in various
blocklists which I have chosen and to tag the item if that occurs.  The
much lesser role of trying to examine the body could probably be
completely dispensed for my mail which contains almost no unknown wanted
mail.  For someone like me who can whitelist all of their wanted mail, I
can include the blocklists made of numerous countries, for example.
Someone else wouldn't be able to do that.

That particular blocklist screening function on header IP information is
so 'mechanical' and easily done by the proxy that it bears no
relationship to the humanoid activities of 'recognizing' spam by its
various contents of subject or from or body.  The spambody isn't even
involved or important very often.  For my spam.

It is also far superior to human eyeballs trying to read spamsubjects
'discriminatively'.  For my spam.  'Looking at' a subject which has been
tagged as spam because it comes from a spammy IP is very different from
'reading' and 'interpreting' a subject which hasn't had that filtering
process applied to the header.  The human eyeballs are looking at a
clever spam subject.  The proxy looked at what blocklists the thing came
from.  No comparison.


-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin