Re: [OFFTOPIC] spam scoring (was: *****SPAM***** Extracting a KeySym from an action routine)

On Tue, 26 Nov 2002 21:30:51 +0100
  Luca Olivetti <[email protected]> wrote:
>En/na David Dawes ha escrit:
>
>>
>>All I can really say so far without having analysed the data is that
>>the number of false positives has been relatively small compared to 
>
>
>Zero false positives is the only acceptable result, if you're using 
>it to discard email.
>You won't get that with any of blacklists.

As an author of one of the anti-spam abstracts Mr. Packard mentioned I 
can't help but comment here.

IMHO blacklist systems are unethical because they work by holding ISP 
customers as hostages. The idea being, if you tick off enough people, 
they'll complain and get the ISP to fix their relays. The collateral 
damage due to this approach far outweighs any benefit gained by 
blocking spam.

I'll pretend this list is a democracy, and cast my imaginary vote for 
deactivating the RBL checks in SpamAssassin.

BTW, the archives of this list make up a sizeable portion of the email 
corpus we use to train and test our systems. Thanks, everybody ;-)

Regards,
Scott Long