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

On Tuesday 26 November 2002 10:22 pm, Scott Long wrote:
> 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 ;-)

well, if it works - then good!  Hopefully it will piss off the customers 
enough that they'll go to another isp, or the isp will sort it out.  If a 
customer cares enough about his email, he'll use a more ethical isp.

JohnFlux