[Asrg] A paper/project worth considering (found it!)

[Chris Lewis]

Rich Kulawiec wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 11:18:47AM -0500, Chris Lewis wrote:
>> We have a TIS button.  I have no reason to believe that the error rate
>> on hitting it is even as bad as 5%.

> Interesting.  As I mentioned elsewhere, I recently went through nearly
> 5 years of feedback loop reports from AOL and found that the error
> rate was 100.00% -- every report ever filed was wrong.  (I think I
> also mentioned that I found cases where users reported *their own
> messages* to mailing lists as spam.)

I don't understand this.  I tried to explain this phenomena before.
Didn't you take statistics somewhere?

Your sample is _extremely_ biased.

Let's say for sake of argument, AOL's users have a 5% error rate.  5% of
what they report via TIS isn't spam.  That means, on average, 95 out of
100 reports are accurate and it is spam.

You have a FBL.  But you don't send any spam, right?  You only get your
share of the error rate, and none of the accurate ones - because you
don't send any spam.

So, from your perspective, the TIS button is 100% wrong.  For _you_ it
is.  But it's NOT reflective of TIS hits against a network that sends spam.

> I have no reason to think AOL's users are any better or worse at this
> than Comcast's or Yahoo's or any other ISP/mail provider.

Are you contending that Comcast's or Yahoo's FBLs are yielding correct
TIS hits?  Or do you have FBLs with them at all?

> What I'm arguing (and I've argued this elsewhere) is that it's not
> the role of end users to set anti-spam policy (in whole or in part)
> any more than it's their role to set firewall policy.  It's not their
> job, and they're terrible at it.

I don't think many would argue against that.  Least of all me or AOL.
Neither Nortel nor AOL lets the users set anti-spam policy.  What the
TIS button does is help highlight situations where the anti-spam filters
aren't working.