On 14 Oct 2019, at 9:07, Thomas Walter via mailop wrote:
Hello fellow email-enthusiasts,
all this discussion about emails being marked as spam or not and why
always makes me think about one thing:
Do we even need Junk/Spam-Folders?
It depends on who "we" are...
I have worked primarily in the "business mailbox" sector, on systems
with a dozen to a few dozen-thousand users, and for those systems? No.
They usually cause more trouble than they are worth. To make them work
well requires real spam-filtering expertise and attention, along with a
willingness to spend the money that implies.
Big "consumer mailbox" providers have a different situation that makes
spam folders useful because they don't need to hit any sort of
meaningful quality targets.
I mean how much mail gets through the first "block directly" level on
your site?
Not a lot. The bulk of spam filtering done by systems I manage is done
before DATA. The bulk of the work I do in maintaining spam filtering is
aimed at whole-message analysis, which is only decisive on about 10% of
mail.
Every now and then a wave comes through and results in a bad
mail or two more, but can't people handle 3 or 5 spams in their inbox
per day?
No. That pace of spam getting past even very conservative filtering is a
sign of something gone wrong. There are some people whose addresses get
onto particularly bad target lists and have the misfortune of addresses
starting with 'a' ( or in decreasing severity, any letter of the
alphabet before about 'g') but those are special cases that can be
handled as such.
Most users of the systems I've managed in the past dozen years have had
false negatives (i.e. spam being delivered) closer to one per week. Of
course, this IS a biased sample: workplace email.
Depending on your client you might even just mark or group them in the
Inbox, so people can take a quick glance and delete them if they want
to.
Is it necessary to sort these and lots of false positives into an
extra
folder that people regularly have to look into anyway so they don't
miss
an important mail? And where you regularly have to remind them to do
so?
What you describe is not my experience at all. Where I've had a spam
folder as a user I have not seen many FPs personally. Where I've been
required to implement them to catch borderline mail, they've caught
almost entirely spam.
The "lots of false positive" problem is a big part of why the behemoth
free mailbox providers (and to a lesser extent, their adjunct paid mail
services) are better off with spam folders. There's no way to staff for
investigating and fixing 1 FP per week per user if you have a million
users. If your filters are that bad, you need some way for the users to
work around and/or fix their own FP issues.
As a sender I am a little annoyed when someone blocks my mails during
delivery, but at least I know about it and can look into it or contact
the recipient in a different way.
Right. As a mail admin, I prefer working this way because it helps make
me aware of the worst problems my filtering systems might have. FPs in a
spam folder that people don't check because it's overwhelmingly spam are
very quiet, particularly with "ham" that people don't know to expect on
any particular day, but want to see if and when it is sent to them.
I feel that's a lot better than not knowing if an email just vanished
(not calling names this time...),
Yeah, but we all know you mean Microsoft. No one else just vanishes mail
by design.
(no comment on the DE legal issues because all I know about it is that
I'm not subject to DE law. Whee!)
_______________________________________________
mailop mailing list
mailop@mailop.org
https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
