With even the best spam tests catching 1% or more of legitimate E-mail
The spam problem is so bad that solving that problem is the first, second, third priority.
Then, FPs are dealt with.
I'm sorry, but this is just an excuse for poor anti-spam software.
There are people out there who use spam tools that are able to catch over 99% of spam, and claim less than 1 in 1000 legitimate E-mails are caught. I won't say whether that is with our software or other software, just to keep this as vendor-neutral as possible.
Clearly, you're dealing with a much higher false positive ratio than 1 in 1000 (as in blocking more than that). So are you saying that catching 99% of spam isn't enough (as in more than 99% must be caught), or that you can't reach that level?
FPs are both manageable and acceptable when the recipients (our users) are informed:
1. that filtering is being done 2. how to report false positives 3. how to opt out of all filtering
A cute answer, yes. But [1] It involves a lot of work, and [2] Doesn't work.
Let's say that the admin of the mailserver finds that too much legitimate E-mail is getting caught. He sends an E-mail to me asking if I can make any suggestions. Unbeknownst to him, I've replied but the E-mail bounced, and I just don't have time to give free advice to someone that is blocking me unnecessarily. So how does he know a false positive occurred? In this case, he's the mailserver administrator, so he can check the logs to see if I have replied. But what about someone who isn't the mailserver administrator? He has to either accept his fate (not knowing if I've responded), or keep bugging the mailserver administrator until either he gets a response from me, the admin says I was blocked, or someone gives up waiting.
That is, the users sign off on the filtering (which includes the risk of FPs), agree to work with mail admins to correct problems, or opt out.
So that's it -- either block 0% of the spam and 0% of the legitimate E-mail, or 95% of the spam and 10% of the legitimate E-mail?
Why not have the users sign off and agree, or opt out, to 99% spam filtering and <1% blocked legitimate E-mail? Isn't that much better?
, it just doesn't make sense to block E-mail based on one test (with a few very rare exceptions).
IMGate's success over the last 3 years says single-criterion rejection makes sense in a very large number of cases.
That's probably because they know that IMGate is better -- since they never get any replies from any of the other anti-spam vendors, and don't know to check their log to see that the responses were blocked. :)
-Scott
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