On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 06:53:06PM -0400, Omari Norman wrote: > It comes off pretty glibly. If it works for you, great, but it is > definitely a turn-off. Ordinarily I wouldn't care enough about it to > tell you, but since you seem very interested in receiving opinions on > this subject...
I'm not sure what gave you that impression. I assure you, I'm not interested. People provide them anyway. No offense at all meant (sincerely)... it's just that I've already thought this through in a lot of detail, and I'm very well aware of the alternative solutions, and I find them all unacceptable. I'm a system administrator by training and trade, so managing mail and spam is a part of what I do; I have no choice but to stay reasonably up-to-date on related technologies. So others' opinions, while possibly interesting from a philosophical perspective, are not something I'm particularly "very interested in receiving..." I'm pretty well-versed in the capabilities of the alternatives, and the pros and cons of each. I remain convinced that my method is technically superior to everything else, even if a few people on mailing lists I'm interested in participating in find it unpleasant. As I said, if you can fix the spam problem, I'll happily turn it off. In general, I really would prefer not to have to bother. When discussions of my spam filtering techniques come up on mailing lists, as they periodically do, people are fond of pointing out that spamassassin (or some other flavor-of-the-month filtering package) handles spam filtering fine for them, as you did, and can't imagine why I'm not satisfied with that. But the fact is that if you do not review all the messages it filters, you can not be 100% certain that it is not filtering something you actually wanted to receive into the bit bucket. If that concerns you, then this is no better than doing nothing at all. Using a tool like spamassassin -- no matter how good it is -- inherently means either you're willing to accept some amount of risk that you'll miss messages, or you're willing to spend lots of time reviewing filtered mail. I'm not willing to accept that. I receive mail that looks like spam, but isn't (at least not to me), and I can not reliably know what addresses or mail headers will appear in those messages to filter on them -- over time, they unfortunately tend to change, as I have found by experience. Ideally, I also want to spend zero time reviewing messages, and my method of spam management gives me both benefits (not zero time, but less than a minute per week, which is close enough). It's convenient (though rather odd) that probably 95% of the spam I do receive is in Japanese, which I can't read or write (though I can certainly identify ひらがな and カタカナ as Japanese characters). And of course, even if someone invented the perfect filtering system that always could tell spam from legitimate mail (it would have to be able to read my mind, I guess), since I already have a system that works much better than acceptably well, and nearly ideally in fact, and I've been comfortable using for about 5 years now, the benefits of switching to it could not outweigh the effort involved in making the switch. So I'm not sure why I would be interested in hearing others' opinions on the matter. [Perhaps you were mislead by me asking Thomas why he was offended... It was a rhetorical question to which I already knew the answer. As I mentioned, this subject has come up before... here and elsewhere. By and large, most people don't seem to care, and I'm happy with that. I personally find no merit in the stated objections. That's my opinion, and you're welcome to yours.] -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank the spammers.
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