Hmm.. good points.. but why not just block the ip address and/or range and not even worry about the extra server load, admin time, and 99.999% garbage anyway? I've been trying to find an adequate - up to date - tld list, or something, via country in order to ban the whole class A.. that'll make some of you squirm in your seats I'm sure.. but my point is if we are receiving 99.9x spam/porn/worms/viruses/trojans/hackers/etc from say netherlands or china, and none of our customers want/need to receive junk from them, then we elect to block them 'at the border routers'. I could not imagine having to pay a 40+ hour employee 'just to police garbage'.. but I guess some of you do..
Just a though, ~Rick -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of William Van Hefner Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2003 2:45 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] Teaching the bayes engine with RBL mails Scott, Hmm... I hadn't even noticed that SPAM is in a different case than spam. I only typed it in lower case to begin with out of laziness. :-) You are absolutely right about deleting first and asking questions later being a poor method of spam control. That is not only closing the barn door after the horse has been let out, but is potentially throwing out the baby with the bathwater. O.k., enough metaphors! My best advice to anyone is to TEST, TEST, TEST before you even think of sending anything to NUL. Always err on the side of caution with the blackhole lists, since they are just the first line of defense. Although very important, they are only the beginning of many tests you can perform with Imail. We both believe in weighting systems of some sort. Mine is just a little cruder and more time consuming. However, I strongly feel that NO Baysean filtering, artificial intelligence, single blacklist, or weighting system will ever be as accurate as real, human monitoring of e-mail. A computer may now be able to beat the best chess player in the world, but it still can not more accurately tell what is spam and what is not better than a human being can. In particular, I have seen Imail tag mailings from a commercial list I subscribe to over and over again as spam, when it clearly is not. In fact, it gives it a 1.00 probability! I hope that Ipswitch will one day be able to extend Baysean filtering on a per-user basis, as that is the only way that accuracy will ever approach the 99%+ legitimacy rate that is possible with that technology. William Van Hefner System Administrator TheDigest.Com/TelCompare.Com > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of R. Scott Perry > Sent: Friday, September 05, 2003 10:51 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] Teaching the bayes engine with RBL mails > > > > >Thanks for the tip about not using "RBL" to refer to generic real-time > >blackhole lists. I had no clue that MAPS went so far as to trademark it. > > They trademarked it first. :) MAPS named their service "RBL", and then > people started to use the term generically (like Kleenex, Xerox, etc.). > > >Why is it o.k. to constantly refer to unsolicited commercial e-mail as > >spam then > >though? :-) > > Actually, there's a good reason -- Hormel doesn't mind people using the > term "spam", because their trademark is in all capitals ("SPAM"). > If I see > people use "SPAM" too much to refer to spam, I point that out too. :) > > >BTW, it was ME who "claimed" to have no false positives. Specifically, I > >claimed to have no false positives during the entire month that > I tested the > >configuration and manually (yes, manually) sorted through every single > >X-IMAIL tagged e-mail from all of our domains to determine if > there was ANY > >legitimate e-mail being caught by three or more blacklists. > There were none. > > Great. That's exactly how you should look for false positives. > I thought > that you were calculating it based on how many people complained about > E-mail getting caught (which isn't the correct way to calculate it). > > -Scott > --- > Declude JunkMail: The advanced anti-spam solution for IMail mailservers. > Declude Virus: Catches known viruses and is the leader in mailserver > vulnerability detection. > Find out what you have been missing: Ask for a free 30-day evaluation. > > --- > [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/ To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/ ___________________________________________________________________ Virus Scanned and Filtered by http://www.FamHost.com E-Mail System. ___________________________________________________________________ Virus Scanned and Filtered by http://www.FamHost.com E-Mail System. To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
