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.
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.
Michael -- Michael D. Sofka sof...@rpi.edu ITI Software Architect, Email, TeX, QIS, Epistemology Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
