At 4:26 PM -0400 2006-08-07, James Ralston wrote:
As a list owner, you shouldn't need to care. Mailman should just Do The Right Thing. My argument is that ignoring content-related bounces is the Right Thing.
The problem is determining, in a programmatic and systematic way, what really is a content-related bounce and what might mistakenly appear to be a content-related bounce, and the converse.
Then look at what happens when you make the guess the wrong way, what potential additional "cost" there may be to the system for a false positive versus a false negative, and add some weightings to the situation so as to try to minimize the overall drawbacks to such a technique.
The SpamAssassin people do this kind of analysis on a massive amount of spam that they have collected over the years, when re-running their complete collection of rule weightings to try to find an optimum setting.
Problem is, it takes them something like a month to make a single complete run through all the rules with all the input spam, to come up with a given set of proposed set of weightings -- and this is on a large set of distributed servers, in a manner somewhat akin to SETI@Home. At that point, they're ready to release a new version, because more rules and techniques have been introduced since the last version they released and the weights have also been updated, and they start the whole process all over again.
Now, we're not talking about something quite that intensive, but it could still be a pretty big affair to make sure that we're striking the proper balance of risking false positives versus false negatives.
As it stands today, it's just some people talking about abstract theory. No one has collected any appreciable amount of bounce information to tell us what the real-world picture is at their site.
If you want to move this discussion beyond the theory stage, I'd suggest that you start collecting some data.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA. See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.