[RULE] Testmail vs Popfilter

[M. Fioretti]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 15:25:25 at 03:25:25PM -0400, Jason Bechtel (jasonbechtel at care2.com) wrote:

> Your point #1 would actually seem somewhat difficult to do in a
> standard way across "all" mail clients.

Yes. It *cannot* be done in a standard way. I put it there as a proof
of concept, to show that this is the way filtering should be
done. Much of the perceived difficulty of text interfaces boils down
to having to configure stuff in different places/files. Something like
this happens transparently from within the mail client.

> Point 2 I cannot personally identify with.  If I'm not interested in
> bank account scams and genital enhancement pills now, I'm pretty
> damn sure I won't be in the future as well...

Take into account that spam is the smallest/easiest part of the
problem. All spam is uninteresting email, but the reverse is false. If
you follow a lot of mailing lists from dial up without any filtering
you will notice that, out of 100 messages deleted without reading:

20 will be spam: never wanted

80 will be legitimate list traffic on arguments in which I have no
   interest *now*. These are the ones who impact more on the phone
   bill.

But you don't want to unsubscribe, or configure the list server or
members are spammers. To save money you need per-thread filtering (**
IMPORTANT NOTE BELOW).

If Red Hat users go on for 150 messages on how to configure SW RAID I
won't care now because my home PC has only one disk now. If I buy a
new one next month, or they do it in the office, I want to start
listening and learning about RAID *without* patching the blacklist by
hand.

Ciao,
	Marco Fioretti

(**) and, if you do this per-thread filtering right, you will also
cancel automatically everybody who:

1) sends a new message on new topic not *composing* but *replying to
   whatever message was received last. Sometimes without even
   bothering to change the message

2) everybody who *answers* such messages, increasing the confusion

This is good, because hijacked threads mess up any attempt to organize
email automatically to save time, including making well organized
online lists archives. If these messages are never answered, people
may learn eventually.


-- 
Marco Fioretti                 m.fioretti, at the server inwind.it
Red Hat for low memory         http://www.rule-project.org/en/

Da quando amo, riesco ad indossare i miei anni: non sono piu' vecchia
   --   Sarah Cristina Ceccarelli


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