[spambayes-dev] Regarding Whitelisting

[Meyer, Tony]

> The users need it. I can know with certainty that the mail
> from my potential employer will end up in my inbox and not
> get lost with spam or overlooked in spam box, eventually 
> costing me my job. There is comfort in knowing that the mail 
> will show up in my inbox and I won't end up missing something 
> important.

You say this without any evidence, of course.  If you can trust a
whitelist, why can't you trust the classifier?

> With whitelists mail would not get "mis-classified" in the 
> first place.

Not true.  Thanks to spoofing, you'd end up with lots of
false-negatives.  Or if you personally don't, many other spambayes users
would.

> Besides, the decision to whitelist an email address (and risk 
> getting mail from a spammer forging that very address), 
> should be left to the user.

We're not stopping you whitelisting; we're simply not adding it to
spambayes.

> Furthermore, going through daily spam, finding the false 
> positives and resurrecting them is more troublesome than 
> going through the inbox and marking an email as spam.

False positives are much worse than false negatives, yes.  But you're
still basing this on no evidence that there will be these false
positives.

> Infact, most spam filters offer whitelisting. SpamBayes just 
> happens to be an execellent mail filter and probably my 
> favorite, so it would be great to see whitelisting 
> implemented in future versions.

It really is extraordinarily unlikely that this will occur.  You (or
anyone else) is most welcome to patch the code to create whitelisting
yourself, of course.  You're also free to use InBoxer or some other
spambayes-based project that does offer whitelisting.

In any case, why not just use the rules of whatever mail client you use
to whitelist?  There's no rule saying that you have to classify every
message that you get via spambayes.

=Tony Meyer