From: Tony Williams 

Geo. wrote:
> "Tony Williams"  wrote in message
> news:3dfb8a09$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>
>
>>Exactly. My preference would be for a two-level system, with automatic
>>tagging of emails which look like spam (we use this at work and it's
>>surprisingly accurate), followed by blocking if the spam doesn't stop.
>
>
> Tagging emails is a great test of the filters abilities but it's not much of
> a solution to anything. The problem is there is a limited amount of disk
> space allocated to each mailbox and when you are talking about a mail server
> of any size the amount of disk sucked up by spam is a staggering amount. At
> a guess, for every 10,000 users (average folk some careful with their
> address and some not) receive about 100+mb of spam a day.
>
> Tagging emails does nothing to conserve this space and provides no deterrent
> for spammers or spam friendly ISP's.

Depends on your perspective. As an email user I can set up a filter which
sends all messages starting with the string "[SPAM]" to a
separate folder and either ignore them or send complaints. If you run the
receiving servers it's true that tagging won't cut down the load but you
can use it as a sort of probation instead of going straight to blocking.

As always: your server, your rules.

> A lot of people say you can't pass laws to control spam because it's a world
> wide network (I agree with this assesment). Others say you can't filter spam
> because spam can be made to look like valid email (I agree with this
> assesment as well). That leaves one solution, it's up to all netizens to
> stop communicating with sections of the internet that allow spamming.
> Realistically that's the only solution I see that has a possibility of
> limited success.

Filters which use Bayesian statistical techniques are surprisingly good at
identifying spam (no, I don't understand the math very well). Blacklists
are the ultimate weapon though, and I wish there were some sort of official
blacklist rather than the multiple private ones we have at the moment.
Probably won't happen.

--
Tony

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