[spambayes-dev] Regarding Whitelisting

[T. Alexander Popiel]

In message:  <002d01c37181$49181220$0a00a8c0 at Aleem>
             "Aleem B" <aleem.bawany at utoronto.ca> writes:
>T. Alexander Popiel wrote:
>> 
>> What I don't understand is why people want one tool to do everything.
>> [...] why should whitelisting be added to spambayes, when spambayes
>> does what it does very well, and other tools (like procmail) can
>> trivially do whitelisting very well, and they can be easily used in
>> conjunction?
>
>Whitelisting is a concept well ingrained with spam detection. I
>don't see why they should be two different tools.

I think they should be different tools because they do intrinsically
different things: spambayes is a statistical analysis tool, and
procmail (or anything else used for whitelisting) is an explicit
patternmatch tool.  The fact that both are being applied to incoming
email to weed out spam (or keep in ham) is irrelevant to the fact
that they're intrinsically different operations.

It may be that people don't want to be exposed to the idea that
there's multiple ways of filtering email, and that multiple methods
may be simultaneously useful.  Alternately, this may be a case where
people think that getting it all from one program brings efficiency
akin to having a single vendor for office supplies.  Or it may be
something else... but in any case, I don't understand it.

Frankly, I don't see any utility to combining the two tasks.  How
would it improve my life?

>I think evidence and argument are being used interchangeably here.

Sloppy use of language is a bane to communication.

- Alex