[extropy-chat] About SPAM again

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Mike Lorrey <mlorrey at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On the contrary, I am actually pretty happy with the
> spam filters that
> Yahoo has instituted. Occasionally one or two of the
> more voluminous
> posters on the various mail lists I subscribe to
> winds up in my bulk
> folder, but I just hit a button that says "not
> spam", and that person's
> post gets added to the Bayesian system.

Using the same filter provider (@pacbell.net wound up
being acquired by Yahoo! about a year ago), I've been
seeing that quite a lot of the traffic on this list
(call it 1/3 to 1/2) winds up in Bulk, as are an
increasing number of other legitimate messages
(corresponance with clients, et al).  Since you're
getting different results off the same data, that
would lead me to suspect that perhaps the filters are
individually trained per-user, except that Yahoo!
implies it is system-wide, and...

> Slashdot winds up in my
> bulk folder a lot as
> well, but I've been hearing that spammers acting as
> average yokels are
> reporting a lot of sites and users who are anti-spam
> as spammers in
> order to shut them up.

...this wouldn't work if it was per-user.