Re: Yahoo and their mail filters..

[Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists () gmail com>]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 8:59 AM, Barry Shein <bzs () world std com> wrote:
> We get a steady stream of "spam" complaints from the AOL feedback loop
> which is virtually all either (we assume) unsubscriptions from
> legitimate mailing lists or random misfires, "it was nice seeing you
> and dad last week" From joe blow, To susie blow, which just probably
> isn't spam.

It depends. What WE get from the AOL fbl is by and large actual spam
sent by our users.  Yes there's a non trivial amount of misreported
legit email but when you get near real time notification of actual
spam too, that's incredibly useful.  ARF - in which aol (and our)
loops are sent is designed to be automatically parsed.  So, go right
ahead. Run the stuff through (say) SA and see what you come up with,
besides running counts / numbers, user X signed up just a coupla days
back and see, he's already got a couple of hundred complaints from
AOL, Comcast, etc.

> Why should my staff and I spend valuable time subsidizing your
> business model? Hire more people if you feel overloaded, but don't
> pass the workload off on others, particularly others in the biz, we
> have workloads too.

Well... If you think theres no value in the AOL or other feedback
loops and your network is clean enough without that, well then, dont
sign up to it and then bitch when all you get for your boutique
network with users who are by and large fellow geeks doesnt generate
any actual spam at all.

On the other hand, for SPs that actually have real userbases to
contend with, and on far larger scales than theworld has .. well,
they'd certainly find it a lot more useful.

> I was suggesting a simple improvement which would help: Don't send it
> as a spam report unless you get two or more complaints about the same
> msg/source within a short time period.

Well .. set limits and you'll have spammers who work around those
limits. Its a catch 22.  Spammers have an almost infinite capacity to
scale horizontally, you'll find.

> I didn't say a word about any of this...

It was a meta comment to the rest of this rather uninformed thread,
but anyway ..

> Well, this is all nice, I'm sorry you entirely missed my rather simple
> and straightforward suggestion, but whatever.

Saw it. Dismissed it as impractical.

-srs