Re: [exim] Heads up?

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Palmer" <nanog@???>
To: <exim-users@???>
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 5:10 PM
Subject: Re: [exim] Heads up?


> Too bad. I don't want to receive spam and the only people that I am
> interested in coresponding with are in my whitelist. I don't have time
> to look through 500+ spams per day (Yes, TMDA does keep count).
>
> People have the right to keep crap out of their e-mail box and have
> freedom to associate (or not) with whom them please.
>
> 95%+ e-mails that TMDA catches are spam - no, I am confident
> in saying over 99% most of the time.
>
> Its the best SPAM solution I have ever found.
>

Just out of curiousity, how do you measure this "99%"? If you are measuring
it as "the percentage of challenges that are never responded to," I would
claim that's inaccurate, since the majority of human users will ignore CR
challenges. Thus, although you might be rejecting 99% of the mails you
apply TMDA to, that doesn't mean all of those 99% are actually spam. A very
large chunk may be babies tossed with the bath water. How can you tell the
difference?

Closing one's eyes and saying "no one has complained" doesn't cut it,
honestly. Because *your* users are the ones who will *never know* someone
tried to send them mail that was tossed by TMDA. It's the outside world
population, getting annoyed by challenges, who would be in a position to
complain, and quite simply, if they aren't prepared to be bothered to
respond to a challenge, I doubt they'd bother to waste time complaining to
you, someone they probably don't even know how to contact, in the majority
of cases, anyway. We're talking about users here!

Please explain, how do you measure TMDA's false positive rate? I don't
think you can, honestly. And it's likely a lot higher than you seem to
think.

Jim Roberts
Punster Productions, Inc.