Whitelist/verification spam filters

[Peter Hansen]

Mark McEahern wrote:
> 
> [Me]
> > The appeal, to me, of the whitelist technique is that for the addresses in
> > my whitelist, there will be no false positives.
> 
> [Peter Hansen]
> > Not entirely true if I understand what you mean.  Among other problems,
> > SMTP has no authentication standard.  If you are using a typical server,
> > somebody can connect and say they are sending mail from <whitelisteduser>
> > when in fact they are not.
> 
> I thought that false positive in the context of spam filtering means
> something is falsely classified as spam.  

In the context of *whitelist* filtering only, it would be equally
valid to call the opposite a false positive, but it's merely 
a convention and you're probably using the "correct" sense.

-Peter