On 12 Sep 2006 at 1:50, Kylde wrote: > I'm truly baffled at the time spent on this, AOL is my ISP, and they > filter great,
Yeah, I know: I have run mailing lists that have been blocked by AOL for no valid reason, and some people at AOL to whom it is near impossible to get email through to them. If you're happy about having some percentage of your legit email being blocked along with a lot of the spam, that's your choice. > .. then I run Thunderbird and that filters further GREAT, the > only mails I get that Thunderbird hesitates about are about 5 mails a > day, all to my free pop accounts (myrealbox etc). This is with maybe 200 > incoming mails a day, am I misguided here? Why do people need more? Is > this my ISP doing better than average, or I'm very low volume mail, or ... ? "Your ISP" has the attitude that basically starts with the idea that the best way to block all spam is to block all incoming email, and then you work up from there at their pleasure. Our whole *ISP* has gotten blocked by AOL [thanks to something like a handful of wholly bogus spam-reports from some cretinous AOLers who figure that clicking the 'spam' button was easier than unsubscribing from a mailing list or two that we hosted, and others who thought they could decipher forged email headers, but couldn't and again, indicted us and AOL promptly banned us] and until we figured out what was going on (and got it fixed) none of our customers could send email to *anyone* at AOL [which also pissed off a *lot* of AOL folk on email lists hosted by us]. AOL was cooperative about getting it sorted out, but our customers *DID* get disconnected from them and there's exactly zero assurance that we won't get randomly blocked by them again tomorrow. I really rely on *receiving* my email and I could _never_ abide an ISP with the wanton-blocking policies that AOL has. I don't know anything about Thunderbird's filters, but I get about 1000 email messages a day, and of those about 700 are spam, and PopFile handles that virtually flawlessly. Nothing my ISP could possibly do could do nearly as well [for example, I've somehow gotten on the mailing list for "the Golf Warehouse" -- spam as far a I'm concerned, but a similar mailng from "Ozone Billiards" actually *ISN'T* spam. How could an ISP possibly sort that out? Or that the buy.com daily "what's on sale" message isn't spam? That an offer of a "Twin Towers" proof set is spam, but that an offer of a DVD about 9/11 from A&E isn't?]. So although my ISP offers spam blocking and quanrantining, I have all that set as low as possible, so that *I* can decide what is spam and what isn't. [that is, I consider running Popfile and tuning it to my likes a *feature*, rather than a deficiency] As a side issue, [since if you're doing "personal" filtering yourself, at a philosophical level it really doesn't matter if it is being done in your email client or by an external proxy] the newest version of Pegasus has a Bayesian filter built-in and many folk like it (maybe that's the kind of thing you're referring to in Thunderbird). It is *real* convenient to tune, but I found that it didn't do as good a job as PopFile does and had some misfeatures I didn't like, so I have it disabled. But for the techie-challenged I can see that it was a godsend: I have a POP proxy set up [and I have an ssh-tunneling SMTP proxy so that I can use my home ISP to send email no matter where I am], but I'm a techie guy and can do that kind of thing [and once done, it vanishes in the background and becomes a non-issue, of course]. But I know that a LOT of folk will have all sorts of troubles getting these kinds of things set up, tweaked and stable and so just letting your email client handle it is a huge win for general-useability. /Bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <-- -- ---------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Is your picture included in the Official Win-Home List Members Profiles Page? http://www.besteffort.com/winhome/Profiles.html If not, write to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
