From: Kelly Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Thanks to everyone who is replying here. Additional replies/comments > always appreciated. > > What started me thinking about this is this non-intuitive but > mathematically valid "paradox" that Bookworm and others have noticed: > > If 95% of all email is spam, and I correctly tell users that I block > 95% of all spam, they might think that 5% of their email will be spam, > but it's actually ~50%. > > Reasoning: for every 10000 emails that come in, 9500 are spam, 500 > ham. I catch 95% of the 9500 spams or 9025 spams, leaving 475 spams in > the users inbox. 475 spams + 500 hams (assuming no FP) is a 48.7% spam > ratio. > > I guess most of the "official" statistics I see are of the form "this > catches 99% of all spam", which makes my end users think they should > be seeing only 1% spam. It would be nice to see "this reduces your > inbox spam %age to 10%" type of statistics.
This seems a good reasoning to me. I'm urged to check this out with my user base. However, in my own mailbox I see by far more ham than spam. Well, it may really be very close to 95% ham and 5% spam. Maybe I'm just out of the stddev limits to be a valid sample since I'm registered with some lists which probably increase my inbound mail traffic away from the common average. giampaolo > -- > We're just a Bunch Of Regular Guys, a collective group that's trying > to understand and assimilate technology. We feel that resistance to > new ideas and technology is unwise and ultimately futile. To resist is useless -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
