ISP Hesitate Over Spam Filtering
from the those-darn-false-positives dept
As the spam battle wages on, most of the focus is on end-users and law enforcement. Not too many people seem to focus on the role of ISPs, who sometimes do take a more proactive role in stopping spam. The problem, though, is that when the ISP filters spam, they often run into issues with false positives. If the filters are too loose (to avoid false positives) then too much spam gets through, and users are upset. If the filters are too tight, important messages go missing, and users are upset. Many ISPs are realizing, at the very least, they need to let the end-user have access to the spam folder, so they can occasionally sort through it for false positives - but very few users ever bother to look through it. Some ISPs don't offer any kind of filtering at all, claiming that they don't see how to make money off of it - which seems especially short-sighted. If they can offer sufficient spam filtering, they're much more likely to keep customers than if they simply let everything through when customers are looking to their providers to provide protection from the onslaught of spam. No matter what, it's becoming clear that the spam fight needs to be approached from various angles, and many customers are likely to bail out on ISPs that don't at least offer a spam filtering option.
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False positives suck
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No Subject Given
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Re: ISP Hesitate Over Spam Filtering
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Use abstraction
1) Have the ISPs use some application that will categorise the emails and add other information. It will then pass the emails on to the recipients. The emails will have effectively have meta-data.
2) Our email clients can use the information to make decisions. Or allow us to make the decisions.
This way, we can have specialised applications at the ISPs and somewhat dumber applications at the client end. People still get all their mail, but that mail has largely been sortetd.
Cheers,
Brooke
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ISP Spam Filters
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