Subject: Re: [Asrg] Textual Analysis is not the solution

From: "David F. Skoll" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 10:21:21 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Craig Hughes wrote:

> There are two commercial areas where the "leave it to the end-user
> humans" approach fails though:

> 1. Situations where someone wishes to "protect" their users from
> obscene mail

How is that a problem?  A clerical person can easily delete porn.  Part of
the spam-control officer's job description might be to act as a porn-censor;
presumably, someone who is offered that job will be told that he/she might
see some distasteful things.

Besides, auto-detection of porn 100% of the time just isn't possible.

> 2. Some employees are better at making decisions that others

Right; so you hire a smart person or people to make the decision.

> And if there are large numbers of such
> employees (picture a giant email helpdesk or something), it's likely
> impractical, or at least non-scalable, to not automate the filtering
> process.

The key is to automate as much as possible/necessary, but no more.
You can delegate down to the department level, for example -- that
scales quite nicely.  Or you can have different levels of scanning --
just tagging, aggressive auto-deletion, delegation to help-desk staff,
or complete end-user control.  Good mail filtering software should
allow this flexibility and end-user choice.

> I agree there is a strong place for human intervention in spam
> filtering, but it's not always appropriate in all situations.

Ultimately, it's the only solution, since deciding whether or not a
particular e-mail is "spam" is non-computable.

> Maintainance of a target of creating the smartest (and most accurate)
> automatic filters we can build should endure.

Absolutely.  But end users must always at least be given the *choice*
to make the final decision.  If they decide to leave it up to the
filter, that's their conscious decision.

--
David.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg