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Re: OT: offending sig + headers



On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 06:53:06PM -0400, Omari Norman wrote:
> It comes off pretty glibly. If it works for you, great, but it is
> definitely a turn-off. Ordinarily I wouldn't care enough about it to
> tell you, but since you seem very interested in receiving opinions on
> this subject...

I'm not sure what gave you that impression.  I assure you, I'm not
interested.  People provide them anyway.  No offense at all meant
(sincerely)... it's just that I've already thought this through in a
lot of detail, and I'm very well aware of the alternative solutions,
and I find them all unacceptable.  I'm a system administrator by
training and trade, so managing mail and spam is a part of what I do;
I have no choice but to stay reasonably up-to-date on related
technologies.  So others' opinions, while possibly interesting from a
philosophical perspective, are not something I'm particularly "very
interested in receiving..." I'm pretty well-versed in the capabilities
of the alternatives, and the pros and cons of each.  I remain
convinced that my method is technically superior to everything else,
even if a few people on mailing lists I'm interested in participating
in find it unpleasant.  As I said, if you can fix the spam problem,
I'll happily turn it off.  In general, I really would prefer not to
have to bother.

When discussions of my spam filtering techniques come up on mailing
lists, as they periodically do, people are fond of pointing out that
spamassassin (or some other flavor-of-the-month filtering package)
handles spam filtering fine for them, as you did, and can't imagine
why I'm not satisfied with that.  But the fact is that if you do not
review all the messages it filters, you can not be 100% certain that
it is not filtering something you actually wanted to receive into the
bit bucket.  If that concerns you, then this is no better than doing
nothing at all.  Using a tool like spamassassin -- no matter how good
it is -- inherently means either you're willing to accept some amount
of risk that you'll miss messages, or you're willing to spend lots of
time reviewing filtered mail.  I'm not willing to accept that.  I
receive mail that looks like spam, but isn't (at least not to me), and
I can not reliably know what addresses or mail headers will appear in
those messages to filter on them -- over time, they unfortunately tend
to change, as I have found by experience.  Ideally, I also want to
spend zero time reviewing messages, and my method of spam management
gives me both benefits (not zero time, but less than a minute per
week, which is close enough).  It's convenient (though rather odd)
that probably 95% of the spam I do receive is in Japanese, which I
can't read or write (though I can certainly identify ひらがな and
カタカナ as Japanese characters).

And of course, even if someone invented the perfect filtering system
that always could tell spam from legitimate mail (it would have to be
able to read my mind, I guess), since I already have a system that
works much better than acceptably well, and nearly ideally in fact,
and I've been comfortable using for about 5 years now, the benefits of
switching to it could not outweigh the effort involved in making the
switch.  So I'm not sure why I would be interested in hearing others'
opinions on the matter.

[Perhaps you were mislead by me asking Thomas why he was offended...
It was a rhetorical question to which I already knew the answer. As I
mentioned, this subject has come up before... here and elsewhere.  By
and large, most people don't seem to care, and I'm happy with that.
I personally find no merit in the stated objections. That's my
opinion, and you're welcome to yours.]

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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