On Wed, 2002-02-13 at 23:28, Andre Bonhote wrote: > My solution will be: Turn off auto whitelisting at all.
Well, no spam filter is going to be 100% perfect. There are emails where when I look at them with my human eyes, and my fairly sophisticated knowledge of spam, where I can't even tell if they are or are not spam. My rule of thumb for computers solving pattern matching problems is that if a well trained human can't differentiate, there's no point even thinking about trying to start designing an automated system to achieve those results. So spam filtering will always come down to a compromise: What level of false positives and false negatives are you willing to accept? If you're saying you're not willing to accept any false-negatives (ie spam comes through without being flagged as spam), then your only solution is to just tag every mail as spam. The upside here is this is a very simple algorithm to code. The downside is your false-positive rate shoots through the roof. Auto-whitelists are (or will be once they're fixed) an important anti-false-positive tool. Yes, they probably will increase false-negative counts, but the benefit is they should hopefully substantially reduce false-positive counts, which many people consider to be worse. I'd rather have the occasional spam slip into my inbox (as long as the number of these is low) than have important real mail be diverted to my "Junk Mail" folder where I might not notice it for a few days. But, AWL will of course continue to be an option -- you can elect not to turn it on if you think the side effects outweigh the benefits. Just remember your choice when that user calls the support line saying "Why did the Big Important Memo from the CEO end up in my junk mail folder?" if that would have not happened with AWL on :) C _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
