[Spambayes] Deployment

[Harri Pasanen]

On Friday 06 September 2002 20:48, Skip Montanaro wrote:
>     Greg> In case it wasn't obvious, I'm a strong proponent of
> filtering Greg> junk mail as early as possible, ie. right after the
> SMTP DATA Greg> command has been completed.  Filtering spam at the
> MUA just seems Greg> stupid to me -- by the time it gets to me MUA,
> the spammer has Greg> already stolen my bandwidth.
>
> The two problems I see with filtering that early are:
>
>     1. Everyone receiving email via that server will contribute ham
> to the stew, making the Bayesian classification less effective.
>
>     2. Given that there will be some false positives, you absolutely
> have to put the mail somewhere.  You can't simply delete it.  (I also
> don't like the TMDA-ish business of replying with a msg that says,
> "here's what you do to really get your message to me."  That puts an
> extra burden on my correspondents.)  As an individual, I would prefer
> you put spammish messages somewhere where I can review them, not an
> anonymous sysadmin who I might not trust with my personal email
> (nothing against you Greg ;-).
>
> I personally prefer to manage this stuff at the user agent level. 
> Bandwidth is a heck of a lot cheaper than my time.
>

I see no reason why both approaches could and should not be used.
MTA level filtering would just need to use a different corpus, one that 
would contain illegal or otherwise commonly unapproved material for the 
group of people using that MTA.   I'm sure that such an approach would 
significantly reduce the mail traffic as a first step, without  giving  
false positives.

MUA corpus would then be personally trained -- although I'd like the 
option of 'down-loadable' corpuses and merge functionality.

Harri

PS.  Just joined the list, so pardon if my thoughts have been hashed 
through before.