> On 1/29/2024 3:20 AM, Laura Atkins via mailop wrote:
>
> > A very experienced spam filter person, who worked at a not-for-profit
> > spam filtering company and two of the major mailbox providers once
> > told me that the biggest challenge with their job was that there were
> > messages that some recipients were SURE were spam and messages that
> > some recipients absolutely wanted. Those were the hardest messages to
> > decide what to do with. They couldn´t block them because some
> > recipients would be mad and they couldn´t deliver them because other
> > recipients would be mad.
>
> Most users cannot be consistent with their own email. One marketing
> message about X is spam, the other is wanted email. Perhaps the second
> dealt with a conference they were planning to attend, or dealt with a
> product they used, while the other didn't. Perhaps the conference sent
> a few to many notices. The test-retest reliability is at best in the
> mid .9s.
This is another excellent example of how a purely technical solution
to the spam problem will likely always fail to achieve algorithmic
perfection. (Heck, even human inspection by a person who doesn't
know whether one, neither, or both of these recipients wants it.)
> I do think "Spam" and "Junk" are poor terns in that they discourage
> checking. Quarantine is a better term, but as has been pointed out so
> much is junk or spam that people stop looking.
I've been using this exact folder name for many of of my clients
(when I've been tasked with setting up their eMail client software):
Junk (suspected)
I've found that this has yielded positive results for most users
because the inclusion of the parenthesized word "suspected" reminds
them that the assessments that caused the routing of messages to this
folder are lacking the characteristic of definitive certainty.
A few users have commented to me over the years that this particular
folder name has actually been a helpful yet subtle reminder to not
completely ignore the Junk eMail folder.
--
Postmaster - postmas...@inter-corporate.com
Randolf Richardson, CNA - rand...@inter-corporate.com
Inter-Corporate Computer & Network Services, Inc.
Vancouver, Beautiful British Columbia, Canada
https://www.inter-corporate.com/
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