Re^2: Spam filtering and regular expressions

For most of my mail addresses, only allowing mail from senders in a whitelist, would not be an option, for I do want to receive mails from people that I do not already know. I regularly hand out the email address of our skating crew, and of course we get loads of spam, but also most valuable messages. And as most existing spam filtering mechanism provided by the popular web providers (like Spam Assassin) already filtered out newsletters that I had subscribed to, I only use filtering with a very high treshold, so maybe I have to live with loads of spam in my inbox. Sometimes it is even hard to figure out whether a message is spam or not, when looking at the title and sender as a human being, so how should an algorhythm get this right in every case? I think it is impossible as a matter of principle.

_{fraktalisman keeps rolling}

Comment on Re^2: Spam filtering and regular expressions

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Re^3: Spam filtering and regular expressions by Popcorn Dave (Abbot) on Jul 31, 2005 at 00:16 UTC
Both you and jhourcle are right. Relying solely on a whitelist is not the way to go. What I was suggesting was to include that as part of a solution. I know that with Thunderbird, even though it's using a whitelist, I go through every time I d/l e-mail and see if something got filtered that shouldn't have. The program's learning is part of the solution as well, however it may be beyond the scope of what the op intends. Useless trivia: In the 2004 Las Vegas phone book there are approximately 28 pages of ads for massage, but almost 200 for lawyers.	[reply]

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Re^3: Spam filtering and regular expressions
by Popcorn Dave (Abbot) on Jul 31, 2005 at 00:16 UTC

jhourcle

I know that with Thunderbird, even though it's using a whitelist, I go through every time I d/l e-mail and see if something got filtered that shouldn't have. The program's learning is part of the solution as well, however it may be beyond the scope of what the op intends.

Useless trivia: In the 2004 Las Vegas phone book there are approximately 28 pages of ads for massage, but almost 200 for lawyers.

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