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Aggressive Email Filtering Blocks Political Debate
Stephen writes "Many of us have spam blockers operating on our mail. But according to this BBC article, when British members of parliament starting having their emails filtered last month, it stopped them talking about genuine political business such as the Sexual Offences Bill, and prevented them receiving some constituents' emails." This problem has bit me on the bum a few times too. About 1 message in every 250 spam is a false hit. Course thats about once a day :(
A similar problem happens with free Webmail or adversiting-supported e-mail accounts. The small advertisements attached to the bottom (I call them "spamlets") will sometimes trigger mail filters.
Watch out for this if you're sending a message from e.g. Yahoo! to Hotmail, who both attach spamlets and both filter incomming mail. They also will not send rejection notices to the sender, so you may never know if you message got through.
According to the article the system was implemented without prior warning. What they should do is educated the users on how to implement spam filtering on their machines and not stop messages from going through at all.
In my e-mail client spam is marked in a different color, and by now the success rate seems pretty good, but I still don't trust it enough to auto-delete them. Spam sucks, but false positives not getting through might be worse than boobie mail getting blocked. In this case members of a governing body are affected. They should be working on legislation against spam, instead of having their hands held by the IT department.
Hank! White!
When the FTC decided to try filtering
Not at all, and you're thinking about far too simple a model.
/dev/null. Mail would have to be carefully crafted to achieve a 20 unless it truly is spam. Such effort is not to be rewarded :-) Keep in mind that mail about laws on sexuality or other simple examples cited in this article would never get NEAR a 20.
/dev/null. This is a very nice way to identify that a) there's a consensus that this very message is spam and b) my local mail patterns indicate that this is spam.
/dev/null to a mailbox that I scanned carefully. None of the messages that I would have thrown out were non-spam.
With SpamAssassin, I deal with spam in 3 ways:
1. Mail that gets a score of 20 or more is sent to
2. Mail that triggers both the Bayesian and Razor2 tests is sent to
3. Anything else with a score of 4 or more is marked in the subject line and I have a virtual mailbox in my mail client that I use to glance at the from addresses. If something looks plausible, I check it out.
As of the development version of SpamAssassin that I'm using (about a week old out of CVS), I get a false positive rate of about 1:100-200 messages and during testing over the last couple of months, I copied the messages that would have gone to
I get a LOT of mail form lists, spammers, friends, random people on the net, machines spewing status, etc. I feel that I'm a reasonably good QAer for this sort of thing, and the new SpamAssassin will rock your world (and the spammers')!