Re: SORBS Contact

[Joel Jaeggli <joelja () uoregon edu>]

On Wed, 9 Aug 2006 23:51:58 -0400
"Derek J. Balling" <deballing () vassar edu> wrote:
> On Aug 9, 2006, at 10:59 PM, Allan Poindexter wrote:
> > At LISA a couple of years ago a Microsoftie got up at the SPAM
> > symposium and told of an experiment they did where they asked their
> > hotmail users to identify their mail messages as spam or not.

<snip>

> The recipient is
> > the only person who can determine these things.

Sure, but humans aren't perfectly accurate...

Early tests with bayesian classifiers, on the false postive rate, tended to indicate that building a classifier with a 
lower false postive rate than the humans was pretty easy.

Certainly my own experience is that I occassionaly tag things as junk, or mis-moderate messages to mailing lists. my 
own false postive rate is probably less than 1% spammassassain's is much lower than that. false negatives however are a 
reason I sitll have to tag things.
 
> I'm gonna hold up the "I call bullshit" card here. Recipients most  
> certainly *can* get it wrong.

>